CableCards and OEM? Not so fast, my friend!
I’m a day late, but it’s been hectic at work. Anyway, live from CEDIA in Atlanta, GA (near my home of Lawrenceville), Microsoft has officially announced that they have partnered with CableLabs to bring you OEM-free cablecard tuners for Windows 7…effectively breaking the ties that OEM providers previously had on them.
I’m not going to repeat everything that was announced, so run on over here and read it yourself. This is some terrific, TERRIFIC news!
I love my ATI Digital Cable tuner and there really isn’t anything comparable out there that competes with it. I was so happy when the hack came out that enabled its use on any motherboard. Now I am glad to see that it is no longer necessary.
I do hope that either ATI makes more Digital Cable Tuners and keeps the prices reasonable or some other manufacturer puts one on the market. I am sure the units available now on ebay are going to continue to rise in price.
This is great news for cable subscribers…but what about Satellite users in the US :/….I use dish and as happy to find out that Dish Network showed off their Media Center tuner at CEDIA, hopefully something materializes from this and a product actually comes out for us consumers…
Have you read about the Ceton cable card products?
“A single Ceton Multi-Channel Cable TV Card with a single CableCARD installed, and using a single RF cable connection, enables up to 6 live TV channels to be distributed around the home at once. So in a large home installation you could have 6 different TV sets in 6 different rooms each watching or recording (or some combination of watching and recording) a different show in HD at the same time. On top of that, an additional 2 or more TV sets (depending on the configuration) could be playing previously-recorded shows from the Media Center PC DVR, for a total of 8 or more TV sets watching at the same time from a single Media Center PC.
Of course you could have other configurations as well such as:
* 1 TV set watching live TV while the Media Center PC DVR records 5 other shows at the same time (6 live streams total)
* 2 TV sets each recording 3 live shows at once (6 live streams total)
* 2 TV sets watching different live TV channels while 2 other TV sets are each recording 2 different shows to the DVR (6 live streams total)
* And on and on…”
Windows 7 supports up to 4 tuners, so this may mean it only will support 4 streams, but still this sound awesome! I wonder if it will work with my ATI Digital Cable Tuner once that new firmware is released…