This is an update to our February post, The Ceton Whole-Home Experience, where we talked about how our InfiniTV tuners, Echo extenders and My Media Center mobile apps all work together to enable a wonderful whole-home TV and DVR experience. With the recent launch of our new InfiniTV 6 ETH network tuner, some people are wondering how that fits into the puzzle as well.

Tuner Sharing!

Unlike the PCI Express and USB versions of InfiniTV, InfiniTV 6 ETH is an Ethernet-connected tuner that plugs into your home network and not to a specific PC. This makes it a great solution if you want to share tuners with other PCs on your network. You can assign specific tuners to specific PCs – for example, assigning tuners 1 to 4 to one PC and tuners 5-6 to another. We’re also adding dynamic tuner pooling to InfiniTV 6 ETH, which will automatically allocate the 6 tuners between different PCs as needed. Dynamic tuner pooling is currently available in beta firmware through the Ceton Diagnostics Tool.

Single Media Center PC Setup
If you’re setting up InfiniTV 6 ETH with just a single PC, your multi-room setup will look similar to the one explained in the February blog post. The only difference is that the InfiniTV device will now be connected to your network instead of installed in or attached to your PC:

The InfiniTV device can sit anywhere on your network and you can still have media center extenders like Ceton Echos paired to the PC as seen above. Due to changes Microsoft made, only their own Xbox 360 is compatible as an extender with Windows 8 currently. If you're using a Ceton Echo or other non-Microsoft extender you'll need to run Windows 7 with Media Center on the PC to which the extenders will be connected.

Multiple Media Center PC Setup
But what if, for example, you want to have the news on in the background while you're working in your home office, in addition to having an HTPC setup in another room? One option would be to set up a TV with an Echo in your office but why not just take advantage of the PC you already have there?

For a multi-PC scenario like this, you can take advantage of the tuner sharing capability of InfiniTV 6 ETH. All you need to do is assign one of the InfiniTV 6 tuners to the office PC and the other 5 tuners to the main HTPC. You can assign more than 1 tuner to the office if you want but we’ll leave it at one for now to keep the example easy. Both PCs will of course need to be running Windows 7 or Windows 8 with Media Center in order to use tuners. You can still pair Media Center Extenders like the Ceton Echo to PCs in this setup. Just make sure you have enough tuners assigned to each PC to handle the maximum number of simultaneous live TV sessions and recordings that will occur across the devices paired to that PC.

In the example above:

• 1 tuner is assigned to the laptop in the Home Office
• 5 tuners are assigned to the Media Center PC in the Family Room
• 3 Echos are paired with the Media Center PC in the Family Room

Below are some useful links if you need more information on how to get up and running with InfiniTV, Echo and My Media Center. And don’t forget that Ceton Support is always here to help!

InfiniTV
FAQ
Installation Guide, Videos and Downloads
Technical Support

Echo
FAQ
Installation Guide
Echo Settings Plugin Download
Technical Support

My Media Center
FAQ
Installation Guide
Technical Support

Ceton General
Ceton Support Center
Ceton Support Knowledgebase