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Microsoft Announces CableCARD Support

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the if-you-yell-loud-enough-and-long-enough dept.

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."

1 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Vista by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    CableCard requires strong DRM -- much stronger than is possible in XP. I suspect it will require the "Protected Environment" feature in Windows Vista.

    About the broadcast flag, it only applies to TV that is broadcast over the air, not cable. Cable has copy control information (CCI) embedded in it, and FireWire does obey CCI -- if the content is marked as "copy once" or "copy never" then the cable box will re-encrypt the data with DTCP before sending it over the FireWire port. Since computers do not support DTCP/FireWire (on purpose), premium cable content is generally not recordable by PCs. (However, in the short term many cable networks/boxes are "broken" and don't properly enforce this.)