Sep 21 Ceton InfiniTV4 Review
We recently received an email from a listener (Chuck Ackerman) telling us about his experience with his InfiniTV4 Multi Tuner PC card. Chuck offered to write a review and we decided to post it here. The InfiniTV4 goes for $399 and you'll have to add a CableCARD rental ($2 - $6 a month) as well. You can get more information at the Ceton website (http://www.cetoncorp.com/)
Ceton InfiniTV4
If you want to build a home theater PC to watch and record encrypted QAM television stations such as ESPN, Discovery, HBO and most of the non-basic cable channels in full Hi Def using your home theater PC then there's only one game in town, Windows 7 Media Center. You actually need two components, one is hardware and one is software.
The only hardware component available is a Ceton InfiniTV4, a 4 tuner television PCIe card from CetonCorp.com which uses a cable card supplied by your cable company and the only software component available is Microsoft’s Media Center running under Windows 7. Those are the only currently selling products that support the CableLabs specifications for decrypting QAM digital signals coming from your cable company. That’s all you need. A home theater PC isn’t a special PC, it’s just a PC that connects to your home theater TV via HDMI using these two components.
It should be noted that ATI sold a USB based Digital Cable Tuner product that also worked in Windows Media Center but it only had one tuner and they no longer manufacture or support the product and it will no longer work with Verizon FIOS.
The InfiniTV4 is a PCIe based card that has 4 television tuners built onto one adapter. I have been using the InfiniTV 4-tuner card for over a month now and it’s a beautiful piece of work. It takes a single multistream cable card, which I rent from Verizon FIOS for $2.99 per month, and permits me to record up to 4 channels simultaneously. The four tuners can be used in any combination of recording or watching TV. For example, I can record 3 channels and watch a different one. Or, with the use of a Media Center extender, such as an Xbox, I can tap into one of the tuners and watch hi-def TV in another room.
With a firmware update from Ceton later this fall any Windows 7 PC in the house will be able to use one of the 4 tuners to watch LIVE TV through your LAN. You could, for example, sit on the couch and watch a college football game on your laptop while your wife is sitting next to you watching Top Chef on the big screen and your kids are in the bonus room watching the Disney channel all while you’re recording Surviving The Cut on another channel. All of this from one small tuner adapter plugged into your home theater PC.
The InfiniTV4 was very simple to set up. Just plug the adapter into any PCI express 1x or larger slot inside the PC. Ceton includes a low profile back plate for those small low profile HTPCs. Then slide the multistream cable card provided by the cable company into back of the InfiniTV4 adapter. Run the setup in Windows 7 Media Center and pair the card with the help of a cable company installer and it just works. I haven’t had a lick of trouble since installing the card and find that it just works without thinking about it. A pleasant surprise in the world of PCs and cable cards to be sure.
In my case I was lucky as I was already using the ATI DCT and had a multistream cable card in the house so I just moved the cable card from the ATI tuner to the InfiniTV4 tuner. I didn’t even need to call the cable company as Verizon FIOS doesn’t actually pair the cable card to the device so it started working without any help from Verizon. Other cable companies are not so forgiving and they may require a truck roll to get the InfiniTV4 to work properly.
You might be asking why bother with a home theater PC when the cable company will rent you a DVR? There are a lot of reasons to want to create a home theater PC. The Media Center interface is much richer than most, if not all DVRs, in existence. And, I’ve incorporated all of my MP3s, more than 400 ripped movies, plus over 20,000 digital photos and home videos in one device. The Media Center experience also includes free streaming Internet TV and many plug-ins supplied by third party app developers. It’s all included for anyone with Windows installed.
But none of those were the compelling reason I chose to install a Media Center home theater PC. It boiled down to one thing: disk storage. My FIOS DVR had a small 160gb hard disk and could only store 20 hours of HiDef with no ability to expand. Record a few of football games and you’re pushing other recordings off into the abyss. And the TV watching committee will convene and vote on never recording a football game again! On my HTPC I currently have a 2 terabyte internal disk drive dedicated only to TV recordings. It can store 220 hours of HiDef programming. Right now I have over 150 recorded programs on that drive going back to last November. Should that fill up I can easily add another drive to my HTPC to share the load. There’s literally no limit to the amount of storage available. Additionally, that storage can reside on other computers or on a NAS, such as Windows Home Server, giving you even more space. I can now record many movies from HBO and they’re always available, creating my own “On Demand” high def movie catalog without any bandwidth concerns.
Verizon FIOS marks every program as “Copy freely” which means I can copy recorded TV to another PC, I can convert recorded TV to an mpeg4 file for my iPad or I can copy recorded TV to a DVD. The “copy freely” tag is up to the cable provider and yours may be different.
The InfiniTV4 tuner is not exactly cheap. It costs $400. But I believe it’s worth the investment and peace of mind of not having any storage issues. Add in the fact that a $20 Microsoft remote will control Media Center, your home theater receiver and turn your TV on and off and you can save money on buying an expensive Harmony remote which helps mitigate the overall cost of ownership.
Recorded TV can be played on any extender or Windows 7 PC on your network. Additionally, and this is a really cool feature, recorded TV can be played on any PC in the world. How is this done? Microsoft added a feature to Media PLAYER (that’s media player, not media center) that lets you share all your media via the Internet using your free Windows Live account. This is place shifting of all your media including Recorded TV similar to Slingbox but it’s FREE. I’ve been on trips out of town where I connect my PC to the Internet in a hotel room, open media player and watch a recording of The Unit immediately. And the quality of the playback over the Internet is stunning. I can also watch movies, listen to MP3s, look at photos and home movies stored on my home theater PC with using media player. It’s a great feature in Windows 7 that Microsoft doesn’t publicize.
All in all, I’m very happy with my home theater PC and its replacement of my DVR. I can highly recommend this product to anyone else that is considering installing one in their home.
To find out more about the InfiniTV4 you can go to Cetoncorp.com or head on over to TheGreenButton.com and there are literally thousands of posts on the forum discussing the adapter.
Chuck
Reader Comments (4)
Thanks for the review. Waiting somewhat patiently for my order to ship. I've been a WMC user since Windows 2005 Media Center Edition, and it's really great how things have improved over the years to where we are now with Win 7.
I have to agree. My Ceton card and WMC have been a godsend.
I've heard a lot about this exact setup. Besides the X-box 360 what other Windows 7 media extenders are out there?
Other than the Xbox, there really aren't any media extenders. There were some other ones for a bit, but they were just as expensive as the Xbox, and were all discontinued.