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[skeeterfood]

http://news.prnewswire.com/DisplayReleaseContent.aspx?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/09-09-2009/0005091086&EDATE=

Any chance this will allow CableCard tuners to work in MC, or is this going to be a Windows 7 Media Center only thing?

-John

[Matt]

Does a CableCard tuner show up like a regular tuner?  If so, it would just work.

If anybody has one of these, we'd be happy to hear from them.

Thanks.

[Daydream]

Any chance this will allow CableCard tuners to work in MC, or is this going to be a Windows 7 Media Center only thing?

What's the format those recordings will be in? I bet it's gonna be DRM'ed to death. Considering how much they say "made for, testing extensively with Windows 7 (only)" about the new cards, looks like it's gonna work in any PC but in a certain software ecosystem only. I guess we can take our chances with the 'copy freely' broadcasts where the devices might work like normal tuners but who knows at this point.

One interesting thing though is that one Mcard apparently can decode 6 streams as it's been said on Endgaget comments and on Tivo forums. So with one Mcard and a tuner you can get 6 streams, instead of daisy-chaining STBs and multiple cablecards.

[bunglemebaby]

A new tool will be provided by Microsoft that assesses the PC's ability to support the solution. This tool will analyze the customer's PC and enable digital cable support if the PC meets requirements,

My understanding is that this bit means that the software environment needs to upkeep the awful DRM standards that are being attached here. My guess is that for MC to meet these "requirements" it would have to buy into some sort of Microsoft supplied API/DRM-enforcer. It also seems possible that Microsoft isn't going to let anybody else play nice with this.

Previously when the digiTV-tuners were only available/working in full off-the-shelf systems I believe they only came packaged with WMC and would not work with other third party applications.  It seems to be a mess of a system on all sides and, for me and I'm guessing others, it's the main part of what's preventing me from going full on HTPC in the living room (I just haven't been impressed with the signal quality of my past analog TV tuners). Hopefully something reasonable is the end result...

It might be worth JR's time to find out what the situation actually is for the digital cable tuners (I'm pretty sure it won't work to just plug one in and have MC utilize it). It could prove to be a real roadblock in the next year or two if they can only legally be used with WMC. It sounds pretty similar to the whole iPhone/iTouch thing to my ears.

-JB