Will it ever? I just bought 2 of these this month, and I love them. But, I'm returning one of them because I bought mine for $209 instead of $129. And I'm still in the return window. So, I get to save myself $80! Thank you Mr. Woot.
The cable company was my big hangup, it took cussing and threatening to get them to fix my signal strength problems.
As I said, I have 2 of these devices, so I have six tuners (You need Tuner Salad, for WMC on Win 7 to use up to 12 tuners) to share around my house. But the additional splitters caused enough degradation of the signal, that my basic channels were not coming through. All is well now.
Here's what you need for a rocking Whole home DVR ...
1) XBox 360 as set-top boxes in every room, it's the only extender for Windows Media Center (WMC) right now. Ceton will have the Echo later in the year.
2) Get the Plugins - My Channel Logos, Media Browser, RecordedTV HD, Auto Rip N Compress, look them up.
3) PC with plenty of hard drive space, 1 Hour of HD = 1GB of space. U can also rip DVDs, I suggest Auto Rip N Compress (see above), there is a youtube vid, that shows you how to get started. **** Important, vid author says to use MP4, forget that if you have disk space use uncompressed WTV, only format I got to work with XBOX and PC and it makes fast work of ripping your DVDs, under 20 minutes in some cases.
4) More than 2 Prime Boxes, you need Tuner Salad.
The best part my cable bill will drop about $70 a month!!! No more monthly DVR fees.
The catch ?!!!
1) Can't watch a show for 10 minutes, hit the record button and have it record the 10 minutes already in the buffer, it records from where you are in the show.
2) You need to get XBox's as extenders, if you have them great, otherwise they are expensive.
3) Works best when you are on a wired connection, I get Network timeout (very infrequently), once for 5 seconds in a 4 hour watching session. If this is a problem and you don't have Cat5 or Cat6 in every room of your house, I suggest Netgear Moca Bridge (Mr. Woot got any of these to sell?), allows you to use the coax line to extend your network, better speeds than the Powerline option.
4) Remote control - it's flat out hideous. Get the old school Universal Media Remote for XBox and recordedtv HD plugin. On most DVR Remotes, you have a guide button, and DVR List button for recorded content. The remotes have no button for content, if you get the recordedtv hd, then u can use the pound button (make sure you select this in the setup of RecordedTV HD, on botton right of main setup tab) to access the content page.
Still, it doesn't control everything and sometime there is a considerable lag, FOR SOME THIS MAY BE A DEAL BREAKER. Personally, I'm TRYING to FIX it or GET USED to it.
5) On the Media Browser page, it was hanging up alot and I had to go back to the Xbox Dashboard, to escape the lockup, big pain, ALMOST a DEAL BREAKER FOR ME, but once I stopped using MP4 formatted vids and went to Uncompressed WTV, it happened much less frequently. XBOX still freezes in Media Center on occasion, I'm still working out the kinks.
*** Tip ***
To make it more like a real set-top box, Goto startup option on your Xbox and tell it to start WMC on startup, this way you don't have to navigate past all the Xbox crap (Sign on, Go To Video/Apps tab and THEN select WMC). Unless you use your Xbox as an ... XBox. I don't.
Overall, the tuner device function admirably, and I give them a BIG THUMBS UP!!!