techreport.com — If you've been curious about whether, how, and when media center PCs would gain the ability to tune and record high-definition digital cable TV, this year's CES looks to be bringing some answers. AMD has just announced a new product in its ATI TV Wonder lineup, the TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner.
Jan 8, 2007 View in Crawl 4
brandonuJan 9, 2007
"Sadly, the OCUR-compliant PC must come from a major PC manufacturer... PC DIYers will be left out in the cold entirely, and AMD could not say whether this situation might change at some point in the future."If the cable companies and CableCard are going to screw things up for people who want to build their own this is going to suck! I've been wanting for someone to come out with a cable card tuner for pc for awhile so I can actually use media center for tv and use my Xbox for a media extender. I thought cablecard would be the perfect set up, but now all this protection crap is making it look pretty lame. After what I've seen from CES I think I'm more interested in IPTV for my xbox 360. It looks pretty sweet.<a class="user" href="http://www.engadget.com/photos/xbox-360-iptv-interface-gallery/">http://www.engadget.com/photos/xbox-360-iptv-interface-gallery/</a><a class="user" href="http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/events/ces2007/microsoftintegratesiptvsoftwareplatform.htm">http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/events/ces2007/microsoftintegratesiptvsoftwareplatform.htm</a>
mcg2k1Jan 9, 2007
I'd be a lot more interested in this if I could connect 3 or 4 of them to the machine and not be restricted to just two. At just two tuners you are totally right, why not just get the cable company version for 10 bucks?
jronJan 9, 2007
what a joke, f**k vista and f**k amd/ati for supporting it. 2007 is looking great...
kniggitJan 9, 2007
OCUR/CableCard should NOT change your mind about what you're buying. Allow me to explain...CableCard is a lame duck right now. Read all of the industry reports around and you'll see that the CE manufacturers and MSOs (cable operators) are pointing their fingers at each other over the botched attempts to get CableCard to actually work properly in the real world. In fact, this is just unidirectional CableCard, so you can't do Video-On-Demand of any type. There's a bidirectional CableCard that's around the corner that can handle multiple streams, but the MSOs still don't have the hang of getting unidirectional CableCard working properly for customers. To this day, there are less than about 200,000 installations of CableCard in the US. To further complicate matters, CableLabs is also considering a unidirectional multiple stream CableCard variant because of the expense of implementation of the reverse data channel. Topping all of this off is the enormous deployment cost because every CableCard installation (PC, digital TV, Tivo, cable box or otherwise) must absolutely be validated by a tech on-site coming out to your home. This means the actual deployment costs for mass adoption of CableCard are in the multiple tens of billions of dollars. Finally, there's no provision for moving your CableCard-derived PVR information to any other device. In essence, it'll be stuck on your PC with no way to get it off.Now I'm going to let you all in on a little industry secret. CableCard is going to be replaced starting in 2009 with something called DCAS, or Downloadable Conditional Access System. It's a far simpler system for cable operators to deal with and has far lower deployment costs. It also has hooks for secure home networking infrastructure, so you'll be able to share this content around the home (albeit in a digital rights management and conditional access controlled type of environment), but at least you'll be able to move it around unlike CableCard. It's relatively simple to implement by the manufacturers of both digital TV and PC equipment. This is where all of the big set top box, digital TV and other equipment manufacters are headed. Best of all, there's no external card to purchase (other than the interface device which, for PCs, will be a coax-to-USB type of connector). See <a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PolyCipher">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PolyCipher</a> and <a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downloadable_Conditional_Access_System">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downloadable_Conditional_Access_System</a> for more information. Broadcom, who is the biggest player in set top box chips, has done much industry wrangling to get this to come into play. The one factor is the deployment schedule, and I can tell you all that most of the manufacturers will start trickling out solutions in the timeframe I mentioned - 2009.Don't let me dissuade you from buying an OCUR-based CableCard solution for your PC. Just remember that your investment may not be long lived and may not have the functionality you're looking for.
polymorphistJan 9, 2007
Think THRICE before you buy an ATI...that's the lesson I learned from my last and the only ATI purchase
thund3rstruckJan 10, 2007
Why not just use IR Blaster? My wife and kids use XP Media Center edition in the den and I use MythTV in the living room and I get all the channels, premium and all. I'm using DirectTV so maybe things are different for cable but I love my media centers and the XBOX360s ability to act as an extender to them
dudley14144Jan 15, 2007
So this is why it's only available in America. What a mess.
raryJan 25, 2007
OK, I work as a cable technician for timewarner and I Can say when cable cards came out they where our worst nightmare. They where not (and are still not) compatible with all TVs. Not only that but the registration process is a nightmare.. That being said.It is entirely possible for a customer to register their own cable card without having a technician in the home. I can tell you first hand that TW would love to have customers installing it in their homes on their own if they could easily at the moment to save on a truck roll. So since the desire is there, is it possible?Let us treat this as a simple addressable active device. You can purchase Cable modems which are in and of themselves simply addressable active devices. A customer Will call in and register the mac address with our internal DOC SIS and IGLASS systems. After that we simply allow this mac Address to function within or network as long as it operates within similar parameters on our network. That being said the authorization process fr cable cards in our local area is pretty straight forward. You simply Plug the cable card in turn the TV on grab a pencil to write down the authorization code and call in to dispatch to authorize the card using that code along with the mac address or serial on the back of the card (should write that down before beginning all this ) And if the dispatcher doesn't screw it all up and the TV gods smile down their beams of compatibility upon you .. it pops up.. We are allowed only 25 minutes (5 points) per installation. In the beginning when it was first released the installs could take hours. Cable labs is NOT a useless organization. They test and release compatibility charts for Set top devices and Televisions periodically. They are a highly trusted and NECESSARY organization, otherwise kiss every cable box in the US goodbye.
bcaesarleoOct 4, 2007
I think the major agreement expressed here and on other forums, is that the industry is still showing disrespect for the system builders, who in fact make everyone's job easier, because we are at the forefront of new technology, often able to assist more than traditional company field technicians. The Arrival of the Cable Card brings a few problems. 1. The DVR Steps Back! Not being able to record what is on my TV is a problem. If I cannot fast forward past commercials and record Discovery HD what is the point?2.Corporate Cable Capitalism! Great way to horde money by restricting the sales of what is already just a PCI Card and adding copy protection checks(certification) and disabling the ability for system builders to get their hands on the technology.I think we have two options. 1. Strike back! We can create our own device/ collaborate/ and certify a device that will accomplish our requirements and sell/support our own community. I think it's quite easy, 1 website, 1 Contribution fund, Phases of Design/ improvements, testing, support.2.The technology seems to have Hardware (Bios) protection built in. We have learned from Vista that this is easily overcome by installing emulation software to make the computer think it has something it doesn't. I.E. Company with cablecard support checks for Motherboard only availible to ABC. I'm interested to see the replies to strategy 1. If intersted please respond, we can through together a website within 24hrs.