Windows Media Center Extenders

Does anyone here use the WMC extenders routinely? I use my XBox 360's extender at least twice a day, and I was wondering if anyone has some good anecdotes on how well multiple extenders work within a house.

I have a very beefy box and really awful wi-fi in the house. Cough the wrong way near my Router or XBox 360 and I'll need to spend 15 minutes tuning and repositioning the antenna to get a signal good enough for standard TV.

I suggest you use fixed cabling. In my experience WiFi isnt fast enough to stream to multiple clients.

My hub on the modem even has trouble keeping up.

I use 360's around my house but I hard wired them all, including my apple tv units. The only problem is bugs or just issues with vista media center itself. I get a lot of corrupt recordings from tv and restricted content messages during pausing with the occasional crashes ... but still cheaper than my old $80 satellite bill. I use the netflix plugin for VMC as well which is awesome.

typemismatch said:

I use 360's around my house but I hard wired them all, including my apple tv units. The only problem is bugs or just issues with vista media center itself. I get a lot of corrupt recordings from tv and restricted content messages during pausing with the occasional crashes ... but still cheaper than my old $80 satellite bill. I use the netflix plugin for VMC as well which is awesome.

The only things I use wireless for are my laptop (and I even plug that in when I need to transfer huge files) and my Nintendo DS. Everything else is hardwired. I've had enough trouble with WiFi's fickleness to just take an hour or so and put ethernet in every room of my house.

Of course, I only have four rooms, but still.

My advice is to dump the 360 as an extender and use a modded classic xbox using one of the latest versions of XBMC instead.

XBMC can access SMB shares on WIN, MAC and *nix plus it supports every video and audio codecs imaginable.

All for 1/4 of the price to boot.