Ceton InfiniTV 6 review: A six-tuner hustler for Microsoft’s failing media center

Windows Media Center is failing a delayed death. It’s not enclosed with Windows 8, and it costs a hundred bucks to supplement it to a new OS. And now that a Xbox One has been revealed, Microsoft’s about-face when it comes to enlivening people to put PCs in their vital bedrooms is reduction of a puzzle.

Third-party developers, on a other hand, haven’t given adult on a home-theater PC concept. Ceton’s InfiniTV 6 is a good example: This digital tuner lets we watch and/or record adult to 6 digital wire TV channels simultaneously.

Like Ceton’s progressing InfiniTV 4—a $199, four-tuner device that plugs into a PC’s USB port—its successor, a $299 InfiniTV 6, works with a digital wire TV subscription. It requires possibly a multistream CableCard (an M-Card) or an SDV tuning adapter, that your wire association is compulsory to provide. Unfortunately, there is no homogeneous for satellite TV subscribers. The InfiniTV 6, however, takes a page from SiliconDust’s HDHomeRun Prime: It plugs into your router, so that any PC on your network that’s regulating Windows Media Center can entrance live TV.

Let’s contend we have a home-theater PC connected to a TV in your vital room, a desktop in a den, and a integrate of laptops sparse around a house: Each one can daub that inexhaustible pool of tuners. But keep in mind that your wire company’s mostly uncompressed HD signals will eat adult a lot of bandwidth. For a wireless network setup, you’ll need an 802.11ac router, a InfiniTV 6 will need a hard-wired ethernet wire tie (although we could try deploying an 802.11ac overpass nearby), and any PC would need to be given with an 802.11ac adapter.

I used connected connectors in my testing, and did not exam with an 802.11ac router. However we set adult your network, those infrastructure mandate are a large fold to regulating a network-based tuner instead of one that plugs right into a PC. Although a InfiniTV 6 has a mini-USB pier during a rear, that pier is dictated for use with an SDV tuning adapter (if your wire association requires one). The usually viable connectivity choice here is ethernet.

I tested a box with several Windows 7-based systems (Microsoft declined to yield me with a Windows 8 Media Center for testing) and a Comcast-supplied M-Card CableCard—the same one we used with my InfiniTV 4 USB, in fact. As with that unit, setup was sincerely straightforward: Install a drivers, run by a few discerning setup procedures, and presto! we had 6 HD tuners during my disposal. Everything worked uniformly from a start, and we never ran into a problem observation or recording shows on any PC we tried.

What’s more, nonetheless we frequency strike a tuner limit, Ceton’s program has a featured called “dynamic tuner assignment” that helps revoke conflicts when one PC tries to use a tuner that’s already in use elsewhere. Instead of giving adult and returning an blunder message, a InfiniTV will demeanour during all 6 of a tuners to see if one is available. That’s profitable for households with a lot of TV watchers.

The InfiniTV 6, however, lacks dual important facilities found in a aforementioned SiliconDust product: a messenger app and DLNA certification. Ceton once had an app that authorised we to watch live TV on a smartphone or tablet. But it achieved feeble when we tested it, and it was after pulled from a app stores. Ceton does offer an glorious messenger app, My Media Center ($5), for managing, scheduling, and acid internal TV listings and your recordings. (Tip: You can use it even if we don’t have a Ceton tuner.) DLNA acceptance would pledge a ability to tide media to other devices, such as Blu-ray players and a PlayStation 3, though we don’t see a deficiency as a vital accountability for a InfiniTV 6.

If we frequently find that you’re incompetent to record all your favorite shows since they overlap, a InfiniTV 6’s 6 tuners should simply assuage that problem. And if we wish to move TV observation and recording capabilities to mixed PCs in your home, this box has we lonesome there as well. But there’s no removing around a stumbling blocks that come in a form of a InfiniTV 6’s network infrastructure mandate and a coherence on Windows Media Center.