Comments on: The Death of the Extender for Windows Media Center

By: Chuz

Chuz — Sun, 31 May 2009 11:34:58 +0000

It's more of a hassle to set up and maintain, but I've eschewed using my 360s as MC Extenders and am now buying Acer Aspire Revo's – £250 for the model I have one of so far, running Vista Home Premium. Just added folders to watch for every category (currently on my main VHP quad core, but getting a WHS Scaleo 2105 soon) and it works flawlessly, with none of the 'Unsupported format' codes I used to get when watching some DivX movies via 360. Plus, I get to browse the web and listen to Spotify over it, something the 360 couldn't do. Also, dead silent and minimal power consumption – in the region of 20-30 watts!

Still keeping my 360s – useful as backups if one red rings and we use them for gaming sessions, so my friends just need to bring games and HDDs from their 360s, rather than lugging the whole shebang, but with Vista Home Premium machines so cheap, I really do think the days of the dedicated Media Centre Extender are over.

By: john reed

john reed — Sun, 24 May 2009 21:56:06 +0000

I think the next year to year and a half should prove interesting. The next version of WHS should contain the media streaming functionality we are currently seeing in Windows 7 RC. If Microsoft were to then integrate the Zune front end into the Xbox, I believe we would achieve the Extender experience that we all crave. On the noise front, like mentioned above, the only time my Xbox is noticeable is when its got a disk in it.

By: Windows Media Center Gets Better With Netflix | We Got Served

Windows Media Center Gets Better With Netflix | We Got Served — Sun, 24 May 2009 20:33:45 +0000

[...] yesterday I highlighted the reduction in hardware options for viewing Windows Media Center on your TV, Microsoft continue to improve the features and services available for the application. [...]

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:14:52 +0000

Anyone with a slightly older, out of warranty Xbox should check these out.. http://www.quietpc.com/products/quiet-xbox

By: Soundtweaker

Soundtweaker — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:10:24 +0000

This is good new for MS as fas as Xbox sales go.
One of the big problems with standalone extenders is,
the average consumer doesnt even know what the hell the thing even does.

By: Rick

Rick — Wed, 20 May 2009 21:26:14 +0000

I just picked up a Linksys DMA2200 a month ago. Its been a great machine for the cash and is completely silent. I picked it up for $120. The other best option was a used xbox 360 and network adapter which would have pushed me over $200 for sure. After reading that Linksys was discontinuing the media extender, I checked to see if I could get another one for even cheaper. Nope. Newegg and they had increased the price! They want $140 for it now.

By: MitchSchaft

MitchSchaft — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:30:56 +0000

Long live SageTV!

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 20 May 2009 03:01:29 +0000

Media Center is dead also, no services, no new features, MS is focused on X-box in the home.

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 20 May 2009 00:35:38 +0000

I hear you on HTPC's, and I agree that the current implementation of Extenders leaves a lot to desire (especially the ability to play native VOB files), but I still think there is a place for some sort of extender architecture. I don't want to buy and separately maintain HTPC's for every TV. I like the WHS idea – let it support Media Center, and perhaps Microsoft build a cheap black box to front-end various screen devices.

By: rbg08

rbg08 — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:50:06 +0000

Had extenders supported more video formats, they would have had much better success. I find myself firing up mine less and less lately. With HTPC's becoming cheaper to build ($300-400 will get you a good rig capable of blu-ray playback) and consuming less energy/making less noise, I believe extenders are becoming obsolete anyways.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:49:20 +0000

I'm really dissapointed by this news, I had been planning on buying two or three for my house, but now it seems a bit silly to invest in an unsuported technology.

I'm running the Win 7 RC as well, and I really enjoy the MCE experianc on my Xbox, but for the same noise reasons I had avoided getting any more as an alternative to the stand-alone MCEs.

The biggest problem with DLNA, is that it doesn't let you stream live HD TV across the network, but who knows maybe we will hear something new about that soon…

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:27:17 +0000

Hmm, if WHS Vail integrates Media Center and supports tuners as i hope it will, there have to be extenders or softsled.
of what use is a tuner-farm if you can't stream to PCs and TVs??
i think you could built a cheap pc that would support softsled with 1080 for 200-300 dollars these days(or in 2010).

But we don't even know if Vail will support tuners
if it doesn't, it will be a big bummer.
i hope we'll know soon (june 5th???)