On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 12:19:11PM -0500, Tom E. Craddock, Jr. wrote: > >Kind of ironic, but I have to say it's quite possible that Microsoft > >might actually be a help in this... for Windows MCE to suceed in the > >long-term, it's going to need to be able to record & play back digital > >cable content. Tivo has already announced a CableCard Tivo box.
In theory PC based cablecard slots have been announced for WMCE but are not shipping. > Well, why does it have to be a PCI card? Whose to say it wont be some > other proprietary device, or even a combo of both, fit PCI card into PC, > then connect wire(s) in some new interface. You have to hook your cable > or cable box to the 'other' device. Another possible system is a card that decrypts only when it is time to playback. In other words, the card takes an encrypted stream, ignores any anti-PVR timestamp rules, and decodes and outputs it as HDMI or component video. If it weren't for the timestamp issues (which I don't fully understand, need to research cablecard more) you could also just record the encrypted QAM, save it, and then spit it back out again to the TV (as QAM) to be decoded by the cablecard in the TV -- again assuming the cablecard will decrypt something being played at other than the time the stream says it is to be played at. You can make this work, even open source, but you can't do things that require access to the stream -- previews, editing, commercial elimination etc. and seeking is harder. OSD would have to be overlayed by the decryptor in the TV, which may or may not be possible. (It would be possible if the decryptor is in the PC card and it has only uncompressed outputs.) Of course, as far as they are concerned, blocking out features like commercial skip and editing are fine with them. Now in many ways, having a tuner card that also contains an ATSC or QAM RF modulator would be a nice thing, though as noted you would need to do OSD through MPEG's channel for it, not by decoding the stream and modifying it. No PiP or stuff like that.
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