FINALLY. Microsoft and CableLabs are finally opened the door to have regular people add in CableCARD tuners by themselves, after they’ve purchased the PC and set it up. This is good news. More »
Tweakers have finally bypassed the one thing in the way of getting CableCARD tuners working on any old PC by fiddling with the BIOS and entering in certain product IDs. It’s a good start.
In a show full of ultra high-end home theatre installations, Lifeware’s LMS-810 Media Centre piece still manages to be a standout. Taking what they came with last year and doubling it, Lifeware has crammed eight CableCARD tuners (two on board and six more in the external Lifetuner box on top) into a dual Intel Quad Core, 12TB RAID 5 box that can stream out to ten Media Extenders (here, Xbox 360s driving Samsung LCDs). The box can record from all eight of its HD streams while streaming to all 10 Extenders at once, so if you’ve been wondering what to do with your home’s 8 spare digital cable feeds, now you know. No price yet for a pre-Christmas release, but last year’s model with half as many CableCARDs was US$15k. galleryPost("lifeware810", 3, "");
We’ve been keeping an eye on Dell’s discontinued CableCARD systems since they first introduced them on the XPS 410s because they were a relatively cheap way to get HD recording on a reasonably-priced desktop. Well, fantastic news! Chris Lanier says that Dell’s reintroduced the CableCARD option on their XPS 420s, which you can customise and get out the door starting at about a thousand bucks. According to Dell, this is a “functional upgrade to the platform”, which means you’ll be able to get the CableCARD on this line for the foreseeable future. Sounds like a cheap alternative to our set-top-box wishlist item. [Dell via Chris Lanier] More »
The good news is, as of July 1 cable companies are required to ship new cable boxes that use new bi-directional CableCards, a move mandated by the FCC to support CableCard-based alternatives such as TiVos and Vista Media Center PCs. The bad news is: Everybody’s gonna pay for it. By next January, set-top box rentals may go up $2 to $3 per month, and the rate hike may apply to every cable-box renter, and not just those who opt for the super-deluxe new models.
The question is, are we turning a corner? The AP story below addresses how badly the cable companies are taking this new mandate. One industry spokesman called it a “set-top box tax” with “no benefit to consumers.” A cable-co watchdog countered that cable companies have no problem raising rates anyway, so having a reason shouldn’t make them mad. But what about those third-party products? The sad truth is, a set-top box issued by the cable overlords will still have more functionality than any third-party product, at least until CableCard 2.0 gets here.
I want to record high def cable TV, at full resolution. So there are only a few choices: TiVo Series 3, a Vista Media Centre PC with Cable cards, or a rental box from the cable company. I realise that this list has a price spread of a few bucks a month to rent the cable company DVR to several thousand dollars to get the PC, but let’s ignore that for a second.
I compared the TiVo and Vista machine with Cable Card this week. And I think you’ll be surprised to know that the Media Centre PC has a better user interface when it comes to recording shows, channel surfing, and watching TV. And playback of music, videos, and photos. The TiVo’s OS just feels aged compared to the slick Vista Media Centre interface. Did that surprise you? I just wrote that Microsoft’s interface is better than the TiVo’s. Madness, I know.
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The Media Centre is better my almost all measurements. But for reasons I don’t fully comprehend, I used the TiVo more. It’s mysterious, but maybe I can shed some light on why:
