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Foxtel & Free to Air in the same Media Centre

For a long time many of our customers have wanted to combine the High definition of Free to Air (FTA) TV such as channel 9,10 etc and the Foxtel channels. The problem is that Microsoft MCE does not support different types of TV input card i.e. digital for FTE and analogue for foxtel.

A hack has been developed in xpmediacentre.com.au which by making some complicated changes to the media centre's configuration by hand can do this!

I have been running this configuration for over 6 weeks now and it works well the only problem was it took 6 attempts to get it working...

Lets hope that Microsoft (MS) in the future will support different inputs and multiple guides...

Simon

Media Centre Extender - Xbox 360

Over the last few days, I have been experimenting with the only video extender that works here in Australia. The Xbox 360!

Spending $500 on extender technology seems a bit rich but it does genuinely work. It will give you full media centre functionality except..

You cannot play your backed up DVDs or your compressed video such as divx (www.divx.com)

The biggest concerns is the data transfer required across the network between the Media Centre and the extender. I do not think that a wireless network will do the business.

I recommend either a homeplug network or standard cat5 network.


Simon