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Microsoft Announces CableCARD Support
Thomas Hawk writes "Microsoft and CableLabs announced today that they have reached agreement that will allow digital cable ready CableCARD supported Media Center PCs to ship by the Holiday Season next year. Lack of premium HDTV cable or satellite support was frequently cited as one of the largest weaknesses of the Media Center platform. Central to this agreement is the DRM protection scheme developed by Microsoft to protect HDTV cable programming under the OpenCable process."
I love my XPMCE network. I don't watch much TV, but I have nearly every movie ripped, 2 HD tuners and 2 SD tuners (had 4 as a test but it recorded too much).
I'm getting HD cable right now. I use timmmoore's Firewire mod and its perfect. I don't believe the firewire input transfers any broadcast flag, which I fear CableCard will.
This is the #1 requested MCE feature. MS came under a ton of angry rants because it was missing from RU2, yet it was the content provider's holdup.
Me? I'll stick to RU1 and Firewire. No DRM, no broadcast flag and gorgeous HD from cable. You can wait until Xmas 2006 if you need official industry support.
I'd love to see HD via an extender (other than the XBox360), or user-sorted Recorded TV.
Of course, it's the CableCard 1.0 spec, not 2.0 it will support. No PPV, or VOD, but it's a good step.
It doesn't have CableCard support.
It took two years to negotiate the DRM licensing to allow CableCard PCI tuners to exist.
Not even close. VCRs have no smarts at all. Computers can be hooked-up to IR transmitters and the like to control everything themselves.
Get an extra cable box, dedicate it to your PVR. You're going to be paying just as much (more) of an extra fee to get a smart card for this Microsoft box, as you would for an extra digital cable box from your provider.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
This is DRM that's been in your cable box for a long time now. It's called "5C" or "DTCP". It essentially prevents a cable box (or any other DTCP-compliant device) from transmitting "protected" data to noncompliant devices.
The problem here is that the CableCard licensing group (driven by the cable/satellite companies) got in bed with the content companies (RIAA/MPAA/etc., driving the DTLA, who manages DTCP licensing) and locked things up under patent protection so that you can't create a CableCard device that outputs a digital signal unless it also complies with DTCP. This doesn't really affect the cable companies at all. CableCard is already secure for managing the ability of a device to receive subscribed channels over cable. But it's a gold mine for the content companies, who now have complete control over your ability to record/rewatch/rewind/fast-forward content received over cable TV.
In other words, it's exactly like the broadcast flag, but for cable. No legislation required.
The reason that Microsoft is able to get a license for Vista to support CableCard+DTCP compliant hardware for the PC is because they are willing to put in the DRM required by the DTLA, a la "Trusted" Computing. No open-source solution will ever be able to get this license, because the content companies decree it to be so - after all, an enterprising young hacker could alter said open-source solution and then be able to skip those oh-so-precious commercials that we don't want to watch.
So don't blame Microsoft for doing what's required. Blame the content companies, and blame the cable companies for caving in. This has been locked up tight for years now, and barring public revolt or legislative prohibition, moving down this road was inevitable.
I have one. It works.
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.