Vista launch is now in full swing. Even as a Microsoft Employee I'm still starved for details on the Vista Media Center Edition capabilities, especially as it concerns CableCard. I'm hoping that all of these questions will get answered tomorrow, but as a preview, here's where I'm at with this.
I currently have cable service from Comcast. It's a little pricey, but I'm pretty happy with it. My setup is that I've got a 36" TV in the living room off the kitchen that's attached to a Comcast DVR. This setup supports HD but is primarily my "every-day" TV watching setup. Downstairs I have a media room (*cough* slash bike shop slash exercise room) with a ceiling mounted projector shooting an 84" image on a a screen. This is the setup for watching movies, big sports events, and playing XBox games. It also has a Comcast DVR attached to it, so that's two of them.
This works pretty well, but I'm not 100% happy with it. There are two main issues. The main one is that I'm constantly wishing that some show that I recoreded on the upstairs DVR was on the other one, or vice versa. The second issue is that I'm paying Comcast almost $30/month for the two DVRs. The upside is that if something goes wrong, I can just take the thing down to the Comcast store about 10 minutes away and they'll just give me another one. And if I was ever to decide to put another TV in the bedroom, for example, I'd have the same issues there too.
My goal is to have one storage place in the house for media. Pictures, recorded content, music, etc. I'd like it all in one place for convenience and for backup.
I currently have Windows Vista Media Center Edition running on a machine downstairs in the media room, and the MCE experience rocks. Ditto for the extender experience to the XBox 360.
So I just need to get the thing to suck right off the cable. And therein lies the problem. In order to get your MCE to directly tune cable, you need something called a CableCard (or OCUR, or Digital Cable Tuner). See, the recording industry is freaked about people pirating content, so they've put DRM on it. That's fine. The bad part is that the trickle-down effects of these policies make my whole grand plan kind of a pain. In order to get a CableCard to work with MCE, you need to get a special blessed PC from someone like Dell, HP, or Gateway. Meaning you can't build your own, meaning it's more expensive. Which brings me to the point of this post.
Here's the things that I'm still unclear on about this whole setup, and am interested to see if tomorrow is the day I'm ordering one of these things or the day I resign myself to a life of multiple DVRs. Some of these things are rumors I've heard, hopefully they're false.
- How much will the Digital Cable Tuner hardware cost? The DVRs have 2 tuners in them. So in order to not lose the ability to watch one thing and recored another, I'll need two of those tuner things.
- How much will Comcast charge for the CableCard itself? I'm sure they'll make me pay something.
- Can I have an over ther air HD tuner in the box as well? If I can, then it lessens the need for the 2-tuners a bit since I can get most of the stuff I watch via the antenna that's already on the roof anyway. I've seen conflicting stories on this.
- Can I make changes to this PC at all? Someone told me they'll be closed systems that you can't futz with or they'll stop working for the CableCard. What I can find leads me to believe this is false. If it's true, it's a deal-breaker.
If I get all that working, I'm almost there. The last step will be to get a wired connection from my upstairs location to the main router downstairs. The wireless signal isn't good enough for HD. I've got a few options here.
So that's it. Be interesting to see how this shakes out tomorrow. Or if it does - there hasn't exactly been a ton of information about this stuff available so far.