DRM is retarded. I have heard that computers must port it out to a crap tv. all tv's are crap compared to a 800 dollar crt monitor, however, rumour is that the content once decoded on the computer wont be put there. I have no idea why this would besides for copy protection. Even though you already bought the movie or whatever.
Dont understand a bunch about DRM myself. Know that as it is downloadable(software)music files have only been in dayview for a few years wich use the DRM. First the DRM itself has problems between propriety x,and propriety y - you purchased from 2 different places etc. To you they are the same WMV file,or what have ya,but they get moved around on the drive - then comes calling the 'authentication,and 'legally the two proprieties are not obligated to talk to anybody about what they have for DRM between them.
Second within all of this is the ideal of the 'liscence',wich you can see in plain site describing what you can do,yet you change out the modem,ethernet card,or cpu,and the description of that detail is out the window,with DRM.Then making it 'your problem,that you must then communicate back to the propriety (wich has a list BTW of everything you've ever purchased)in order to run under the DRM.
But I didn't post here to say something about the DRM. Everybody on the 'in'side of DRM,knows it is simply programable on the software side.And must run on the client side. And still the 'user does not know what the features of the DRM is to the items they purchase'. You simply crash,and burn them..literally.
What I really wanted to say,is that Cable,has a legal obligation to its sponsors.They dont necesarily 'distribute',they merely 'show what its obligations have been the result of.Even though the technology side,can offer so much more (now give me a 19.5 Mbs internet connection etc),the usability model of copyrighted works haven't edged all that far from the intillment of the agenda its present manufacturing,production,and distribution structure has from due cause.
If everybody continues to deal with 'liscence'then the technology will be used as it is today.To create that the featureset of the technology is that of the copyright holder.I think that there could be a 'first sale'right in software downloads,even though the copyright is as they are. Cause I know I would,and do intention to collect what archives pass for time in this life of mortality.Even though the copyrighted agenda seems waining to believe they are immortal,and require class above reasonable intelegence.
The FCC cant do it all.Since programability comes with the infinite possibilities of the digital realm. But there are not any 'standards'in copyright.So that that 'first sale,can compete with all the lawyers - and those copyright notices BTW,wich are certainly flawed in their person.The truth about it is,that we cannot simply be whooed by a light bulb of one-way broadcast anymore.We have better,we know it.The instillment of copyrights,or no copyrights does not change the relationship we have with the technology. It changes only the relationship of the copyrighted works and the technology.
With cable,I'll just put in an early request for a hot-button 'buy" into the programming of the cable.Buy 'movie". The same ubiquity as that of the different media,and pertaining to the same copyright law.Then BTW give me a receipt on the screen,next to that copyright notice.
Copyrighted works have the same friends they have had in the past.It is not too much to have them sit on microscopic shelf for the retention of their immortal souls.As an asset to my own managerie.Knowing them by their name.Of course.
The HD support itself shouldn't be news to you, but the hardware that enables the support is what we're here to talk about today and the only company that's currently demonstrating it is ATI.
How disappointing!
Although protected by Vista's DRM, once on your machine you should be able to share the content throughout your network, however it has yet to be seen exactly how that's going to work. We would assume that you should at least be able to stream the content to any Xbox 360s on your network.
Gee, how nice of them. Look, I have fair use rights which I expect journalists to stand up for. You guys should ask these questions up front instead of just letting people get excited about the technology.
I am not paying money to upgrade all my home computers to Vista just for HD support - especially not if it doesn't produce unencrypted, non-proprietary, HD-quality files. Sorry, ATI.
While Vista itself has a lot going for it, quite possibly the most exciting feature of all will be support for CableCard made possible by ATI's tuner - it's what we're looking forward to this year.
You look forward to paying people just to take away your fair use rights?
Hardware and cable companies aren't to blame for this DRM nightmare. It's entirely driven by content creators. Hardware and communications would like you to buy and use their products to your heart's content, and this is hampered by DRM.
2 Examples:
ATI's AIW x800 and higher were held up as much as a year because the design did not comply with the proposed Broadcast Flag, which was delayed but not yet beaten. This legal uncertainty prevented ATI from committing to and developing the new AIW cards.
Any decent cable company offers high speed internet service. Many times, any slowdown you may observe is a problem with the open internet, not your connection to the cable company. The question now is, what to do with all that internet? Any law-abiding citizen would refrain from downloading absolutely tons of illegal material. I get tons of legit music freely from bt.etree.org (GD, Phish, DMB, PJ, many, many more) Other than that, what? There's no high-quality network streams. I'd like to go to wbz.com (my local CBS) and watch WBZ live and in HD. Where the Hell is it?
Yes, I work for the cable company, and yes, I've owned an AIW.
A) Your "fair use" rights died around 1995. Sorry. I too morn their loss, but thats the way it is.
B) Getting angry at ATI for something forced on them by the TV industry isnt exactly productive.
C) Anandtech is a TECHNOLOGY website... and getting people EXCITED ABOUT TECHNOLOGY is what its FOR.
D) It doesnt make alot of sense to drill ATI's engineers for information on a product 1 year away from first launch... and to drill them on legal issues and questiosn that the engineers at a trade show likely have NOTHING to do with.
A) Your "fair use" rights died around 1995. Sorry. I too morn their loss, but thats the way it is.
I'm glad to hear that you care, but maybe the energy you spend mourning their loss could be better spent exercising a little free political speech.
B) Getting angry at ATI for something forced on them by the TV industry isnt exactly productive.
"The devil made me do it" is a bad argument. If they're producing a product which can only be used with DRM, they're partly to blame for DRM adoption.
C) Anandtech is a TECHNOLOGY website... and getting people EXCITED ABOUT TECHNOLOGY is what its FOR.
I don't recall asking them to avoid getting people excited about the technology. (Note the word "just" in my original post.) The problem is that the article only mentions the legal issues in passing whereas they should be a much higher priority. I would have been happy had they included something like the following:
"While the OCUR uses Vista's DRM technology, it's not clear whether the hardware will be tied to this technology, and we are concerned with how this will play out with third party software such as SageTV and BeyondTV. Traditionally, SDTV tuners have supported the MPEG-2 format as a de facto standard, allowing PVR software and hardware, video editing software, and DVD-burning software from many different companies to work together. If this approach is abandoned in favor of a proprietary format, all this compatibility gets thrown out the window."
After all, you'd think a technology site would care whether the technology was going to be arbitrarily crippled by tying it to a new OS license and proprietary formats. Like, maybe, those of us who may be interested in buying the product.
D) It doesnt make alot of sense to drill ATI's engineers for information on a product 1 year away from first launch...
As per the article, they have the hardware reference design working, and software is being demoed. If at this point they don't have information about what formats and technologies they can legally support, they appear to have some problems. Don't they usually sort out the legal issues FIRST, so that they avoid designing and producing things they can't sell?
and to drill them on legal issues and questiosn that the engineers at a trade show likely have NOTHING to do with.
Point taken, but is it not possible for Anandtech to contact ATI directly on this?
Ok, so we get cablecard support. Why is it, everyone keeps forgetting about Satellite people? Its a cold day in hell when i submit to the ripoff programming of cable companies in my area. Ill be impressed when SATV owners are included.
I bought XP the day it came out and unlike 9x I was extremely happy with the stability and it all around. I do not know if I want to deal with Vista's bloat on any of my boxes. Am I to believe that no one will be coming out with HDTV cable card support in MCE 2005 in the future? I can't say I am nervously waiting for Vista to suck up 512 megs of my memory. I have XP tweaked to 140 MB on loadup and XP suits me fine for the forseable future.
So this card can tune HD and digital channels? I'm a newbie in the tuner world but thought that without connecting your existing cable box to your tuner, you could only tune into analog channels with these cards.
Yes, that's the whole point of Cable Cards. They can do the decryption that a cable box can, with some limitations as mentioned in the article.
Personally I think the idea is cool (though it'll likely be dragged down by DRM as others have said), but I don't really have any interest in paying for premium HDTV channels when I can already get the national networks in HD just fine over the air or cable.
I'm betting we'll see a lot similar products from Taiwan and South Korea that will work just fine without all the DRM crap. I'd much rather see a 1394 interface though, since connecting multiple ones to your PC is going to drive up the CPU utilization over USB.
Screw them and their DRM bull S*^(. I will keep on using my $10/month dual HD tuner DVR and if I need a show on DVD, I'll just connect my laptop through firewire with a driver that makes it appear as a digital vcr.
In the meantime I'll continue laughing at the people that spent $2000 on a media PC only to have less functionality than my $10/month DVR and $70 dvd player with DivX support.
Umm, hate to break it to you but, that box has DRM too. Try recording HBO lately? If you are lucky enough to be able to, it won't last long. (I have a couple of firewire tuners at my house... and I use MCE)
They don't expire. I just get straight mpeg captures, I can even record HBO HD over firewire. Nothing I've ever gotten 'expired', and they play in 3 different OS as well.
Maybe my local Comcast isn't doing anything yet though, beats me.
It has a record once mode which only lets you play back on the device that recorded it. That's DRM... That your local Comcast doesn't have 5C encryption enabled means your lucky. Mine does on the premium channels, some have it even on broadcast HD stations.
Your not up to date or you would be pissed to, because Vista as it is now has to many restrictions on data. Even your OWN music/movies will have same restrictions if you downloaded a movie online from BT. copy Shrek to a DVD so i could take on laptop on trips, you can't play it on vista because DRM. Lots of stupid stuff like that, basicly you have to play original DVD of shrek. Its ass backwords
Isn't it possible to copy e.g. a DVD to a format that doesn't contain DRM as an AVI file. And the DVD content protection has been cracked long ago, how would you make certain that a copied DVD can't be played in Vista. I must admit that I haven't researched the subject much, could you provide a link to some good info about Vista's DRM?
Hah, seriously. The only problem I have with Vista's DRM is that (its rumored) that it will need a special monitor to output HD quality stuff and that I can just see a time limit being imposed on content recorded by the media center PC (then again, archiving stuff recorded from TV IS illegal...).
maybe in the US of A, for instance in DE it is explicitly allowed since anything freely broadcasted on the air is since then considered public, you cannot record and sell it, however you could archive it as long as you like.
I too kinda don't why undestand archiving TV shows is illegal? It's the same nonsense as making illegal archiving newspapers you bought. Maybe the US media machine just doesn't like people to remember what some peple told in the past.
That way proving someone is a liar is illegal. Funnny if it was in was not for real ;(
How do you do this? I've never been able to get my Motorola dual HD tuner to work properly via firewire. I get output, but it's never usuable. If I could get it to work properly I would definitely agree with you. Otherwise, this ATI setup is of real interest to me. I do connect and use a driver that makes it look like a digital vcr, but I can never play the output.
If you've got an extra computer anyway it doesn't cost anywhere near $2000 to build a PVR out of it. You don't need a fast computer to do it. My PVR uses my old AMD 2100. I added a Hauppauge dual tuner card and Snapstream Beyond TV. Now it isn't a HD recorder the way I have it set up, but it could be with the addition of a HD tuner. My total cost was less than $200. Saving money is not really the point anyway, it's just fun to do.
For 10$ a month, you would need two years to cover that $200 investment. I think any way is just as good (but one has the advantage of less clutter and the other the advantage of keeping the PC usable for anything else (including heavy loads)
Hear hear! DRM has to change drastically before i even consider Vista. Right now most people i know with TV tuners are just not getting vista because of the terrible DRM.
I'm hoping ati will release a dual-tuner version (being able to tune 2 analog or digital channels at once). I will most likely buy an external version as it would be nice to stow away the (dual tuner) box by the tv-outlet and then just route the two video channels in one usb cable. Just to bad I would need to use repeaters if the distance is more than 5 metres - a gigabit ethernet version would certainly be better.
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Jynx980 - Sunday, January 8, 2006 - link
Thumbsup for watching Bill and Teds Bogus Journey!Tujan - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
imatation miniture cable box that you put on your pc. Dhh ha.(all it good jest).
ElJefe - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
I cant wait till someone smart hacks it.DRM is retarded. I have heard that computers must port it out to a crap tv. all tv's are crap compared to a 800 dollar crt monitor, however, rumour is that the content once decoded on the computer wont be put there. I have no idea why this would besides for copy protection. Even though you already bought the movie or whatever.
gay = drm
Tujan - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
Dont understand a bunch about DRM myself. Know that as it is downloadable(software)music files have only been in dayview for a few years wich use the DRM. First the DRM itself has problems between propriety x,and propriety y - you purchased from 2 different places etc. To you they are the same WMV file,or what have ya,but they get moved around on the drive - then comes calling the 'authentication,and 'legally the two proprieties are not obligated to talk to anybody about what they have for DRM between them.Second within all of this is the ideal of the 'liscence',wich you can see in plain site describing what you can do,yet you change out the modem,ethernet card,or cpu,and the description of that detail is out the window,with DRM.Then making it 'your problem,that you must then communicate back to the propriety (wich has a list BTW of everything you've ever purchased)in order to run under the DRM.
But I didn't post here to say something about the DRM. Everybody on the 'in'side of DRM,knows it is simply programable on the software side.And must run on the client side. And still the 'user does not know what the features of the DRM is to the items they purchase'. You simply crash,and burn them..literally.
What I really wanted to say,is that Cable,has a legal obligation to its sponsors.They dont necesarily 'distribute',they merely 'show what its obligations have been the result of.Even though the technology side,can offer so much more (now give me a 19.5 Mbs internet connection etc),the usability model of copyrighted works haven't edged all that far from the intillment of the agenda its present manufacturing,production,and distribution structure has from due cause.
If everybody continues to deal with 'liscence'then the technology will be used as it is today.To create that the featureset of the technology is that of the copyright holder.I think that there could be a 'first sale'right in software downloads,even though the copyright is as they are. Cause I know I would,and do intention to collect what archives pass for time in this life of mortality.Even though the copyrighted agenda seems waining to believe they are immortal,and require class above reasonable intelegence.
The FCC cant do it all.Since programability comes with the infinite possibilities of the digital realm. But there are not any 'standards'in copyright.So that that 'first sale,can compete with all the lawyers - and those copyright notices BTW,wich are certainly flawed in their person.The truth about it is,that we cannot simply be whooed by a light bulb of one-way broadcast anymore.We have better,we know it.The instillment of copyrights,or no copyrights does not change the relationship we have with the technology. It changes only the relationship of the copyrighted works and the technology.
With cable,I'll just put in an early request for a hot-button 'buy" into the programming of the cable.Buy 'movie". The same ubiquity as that of the different media,and pertaining to the same copyright law.Then BTW give me a receipt on the screen,next to that copyright notice.
Copyrighted works have the same friends they have had in the past.It is not too much to have them sit on microscopic shelf for the retention of their immortal souls.As an asset to my own managerie.Knowing them by their name.Of course.
nullpointerus - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
The HD support itself shouldn't be news to you, but the hardware that enables the support is what we're here to talk about today and the only company that's currently demonstrating it is ATI.How disappointing!
Although protected by Vista's DRM, once on your machine you should be able to share the content throughout your network, however it has yet to be seen exactly how that's going to work. We would assume that you should at least be able to stream the content to any Xbox 360s on your network.
Gee, how nice of them. Look, I have fair use rights which I expect journalists to stand up for. You guys should ask these questions up front instead of just letting people get excited about the technology.
I am not paying money to upgrade all my home computers to Vista just for HD support - especially not if it doesn't produce unencrypted, non-proprietary, HD-quality files. Sorry, ATI.
While Vista itself has a lot going for it, quite possibly the most exciting feature of all will be support for CableCard made possible by ATI's tuner - it's what we're looking forward to this year.
You look forward to paying people just to take away your fair use rights?
The Boston Dangler - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Hardware and cable companies aren't to blame for this DRM nightmare. It's entirely driven by content creators. Hardware and communications would like you to buy and use their products to your heart's content, and this is hampered by DRM.2 Examples:
ATI's AIW x800 and higher were held up as much as a year because the design did not comply with the proposed Broadcast Flag, which was delayed but not yet beaten. This legal uncertainty prevented ATI from committing to and developing the new AIW cards.
Any decent cable company offers high speed internet service. Many times, any slowdown you may observe is a problem with the open internet, not your connection to the cable company. The question now is, what to do with all that internet? Any law-abiding citizen would refrain from downloading absolutely tons of illegal material. I get tons of legit music freely from bt.etree.org (GD, Phish, DMB, PJ, many, many more) Other than that, what? There's no high-quality network streams. I'd like to go to wbz.com (my local CBS) and watch WBZ live and in HD. Where the Hell is it?
Yes, I work for the cable company, and yes, I've owned an AIW.
Cygni - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
A) Your "fair use" rights died around 1995. Sorry. I too morn their loss, but thats the way it is.B) Getting angry at ATI for something forced on them by the TV industry isnt exactly productive.
C) Anandtech is a TECHNOLOGY website... and getting people EXCITED ABOUT TECHNOLOGY is what its FOR.
D) It doesnt make alot of sense to drill ATI's engineers for information on a product 1 year away from first launch... and to drill them on legal issues and questiosn that the engineers at a trade show likely have NOTHING to do with.
Thanks.
Chadder007 - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
I blame Bill Clinton for this BS.nullpointerus - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
A) Your "fair use" rights died around 1995. Sorry. I too morn their loss, but thats the way it is.I'm glad to hear that you care, but maybe the energy you spend mourning their loss could be better spent exercising a little free political speech.
B) Getting angry at ATI for something forced on them by the TV industry isnt exactly productive.
"The devil made me do it" is a bad argument. If they're producing a product which can only be used with DRM, they're partly to blame for DRM adoption.
C) Anandtech is a TECHNOLOGY website... and getting people EXCITED ABOUT TECHNOLOGY is what its FOR.
I don't recall asking them to avoid getting people excited about the technology. (Note the word "just" in my original post.) The problem is that the article only mentions the legal issues in passing whereas they should be a much higher priority. I would have been happy had they included something like the following:
"While the OCUR uses Vista's DRM technology, it's not clear whether the hardware will be tied to this technology, and we are concerned with how this will play out with third party software such as SageTV and BeyondTV. Traditionally, SDTV tuners have supported the MPEG-2 format as a de facto standard, allowing PVR software and hardware, video editing software, and DVD-burning software from many different companies to work together. If this approach is abandoned in favor of a proprietary format, all this compatibility gets thrown out the window."
After all, you'd think a technology site would care whether the technology was going to be arbitrarily crippled by tying it to a new OS license and proprietary formats. Like, maybe, those of us who may be interested in buying the product.
D) It doesnt make alot of sense to drill ATI's engineers for information on a product 1 year away from first launch...
As per the article, they have the hardware reference design working, and software is being demoed. If at this point they don't have information about what formats and technologies they can legally support, they appear to have some problems. Don't they usually sort out the legal issues FIRST, so that they avoid designing and producing things they can't sell?
and to drill them on legal issues and questiosn that the engineers at a trade show likely have NOTHING to do with.
Point taken, but is it not possible for Anandtech to contact ATI directly on this?
OddTSi - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Why does the internal card use a USB connection? Why not PCI or PCI-e?Venomous - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Ok, so we get cablecard support. Why is it, everyone keeps forgetting about Satellite people? Its a cold day in hell when i submit to the ripoff programming of cable companies in my area. Ill be impressed when SATV owners are included.Yianaki - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
I bought XP the day it came out and unlike 9x I was extremely happy with the stability and it all around. I do not know if I want to deal with Vista's bloat on any of my boxes. Am I to believe that no one will be coming out with HDTV cable card support in MCE 2005 in the future? I can't say I am nervously waiting for Vista to suck up 512 megs of my memory. I have XP tweaked to 140 MB on loadup and XP suits me fine for the forseable future.Dismal - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
So this card can tune HD and digital channels? I'm a newbie in the tuner world but thought that without connecting your existing cable box to your tuner, you could only tune into analog channels with these cards.SynthDude2001 - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Yes, that's the whole point of Cable Cards. They can do the decryption that a cable box can, with some limitations as mentioned in the article.Personally I think the idea is cool (though it'll likely be dragged down by DRM as others have said), but I don't really have any interest in paying for premium HDTV channels when I can already get the national networks in HD just fine over the air or cable.
Dismal - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Ahh, I understand. Thanks for the replies guys.Furen - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
I think that's what the Cablecard slot is for, to allow you to decode the encoded crap your cable provider sends you.AlexWade - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Just curious, but is it possible that this device will work for Linux instead?Doormat - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Snowball's chance in hell. DRM is the name of the game here.It is possible however, that there would be Mac drivers, allowing the Mac Mini to act like a PVR utilizing Front Row.
Xenoterranos - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Well, if there is a MAC driver, then you're only a step away from a serviceable *nix driver for any x86 PC now that MAC's are using intel processors.DigitalFreak - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
I'm betting we'll see a lot similar products from Taiwan and South Korea that will work just fine without all the DRM crap. I'd much rather see a 1394 interface though, since connecting multiple ones to your PC is going to drive up the CPU utilization over USB.sprockkets - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Like who is going to share a 19.2mbps data signal? Recording HDTV will always be a minefield, with allowing who to record what.gibhunter - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Screw them and their DRM bull S*^(. I will keep on using my $10/month dual HD tuner DVR and if I need a show on DVD, I'll just connect my laptop through firewire with a driver that makes it appear as a digital vcr.In the meantime I'll continue laughing at the people that spent $2000 on a media PC only to have less functionality than my $10/month DVR and $70 dvd player with DivX support.
glennpratt - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Umm, hate to break it to you but, that box has DRM too. Try recording HBO lately? If you are lucky enough to be able to, it won't last long. (I have a couple of firewire tuners at my house... and I use MCE)Hikari - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
They don't expire. I just get straight mpeg captures, I can even record HBO HD over firewire. Nothing I've ever gotten 'expired', and they play in 3 different OS as well.Maybe my local Comcast isn't doing anything yet though, beats me.
glennpratt - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
It has a record once mode which only lets you play back on the device that recorded it. That's DRM... That your local Comcast doesn't have 5C encryption enabled means your lucky. Mine does on the premium channels, some have it even on broadcast HD stations.raskren - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
OMG! Terrible Windows DRM! Run while you still can!What's the problem here kiddies? Afraid you won't be able to pirate movies as easily?
imaheadcase - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Your not up to date or you would be pissed to, because Vista as it is now has to many restrictions on data. Even your OWN music/movies will have same restrictions if you downloaded a movie online from BT. copy Shrek to a DVD so i could take on laptop on trips, you can't play it on vista because DRM. Lots of stupid stuff like that, basicly you have to play original DVD of shrek. Its ass backwordsglennpratt - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
I don't know where you got this from, it's pretty much total BS. Link please.AndyKH - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
Isn't it possible to copy e.g. a DVD to a format that doesn't contain DRM as an AVI file. And the DVD content protection has been cracked long ago, how would you make certain that a copied DVD can't be played in Vista. I must admit that I haven't researched the subject much, could you provide a link to some good info about Vista's DRM?The Boston Dangler - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/12893">http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/12893Furen - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Hah, seriously. The only problem I have with Vista's DRM is that (its rumored) that it will need a special monitor to output HD quality stuff and that I can just see a time limit being imposed on content recorded by the media center PC (then again, archiving stuff recorded from TV IS illegal...).mino - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
maybe in the US of A, for instance in DE it is explicitly allowed since anything freely broadcasted on the air is since then considered public, you cannot record and sell it, however you could archive it as long as you like.I too kinda don't why undestand archiving TV shows is illegal? It's the same nonsense as making illegal archiving newspapers you bought. Maybe the US media machine just doesn't like people to remember what some peple told in the past.
That way proving someone is a liar is illegal. Funnny if it was in was not for real ;(
mino - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
that typing, that typing ;)BPB - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
How do you do this? I've never been able to get my Motorola dual HD tuner to work properly via firewire. I get output, but it's never usuable. If I could get it to work properly I would definitely agree with you. Otherwise, this ATI setup is of real interest to me. I do connect and use a driver that makes it look like a digital vcr, but I can never play the output.GoatMonkey - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
If you've got an extra computer anyway it doesn't cost anywhere near $2000 to build a PVR out of it. You don't need a fast computer to do it. My PVR uses my old AMD 2100. I added a Hauppauge dual tuner card and Snapstream Beyond TV. Now it isn't a HD recorder the way I have it set up, but it could be with the addition of a HD tuner. My total cost was less than $200. Saving money is not really the point anyway, it's just fun to do.Calin - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
For 10$ a month, you would need two years to cover that $200 investment. I think any way is just as good (but one has the advantage of less clutter and the other the advantage of keeping the PC usable for anything else (including heavy loads)GoatMonkey - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
Yeah, but DIY is always cooler.imaheadcase - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Hear hear! DRM has to change drastically before i even consider Vista. Right now most people i know with TV tuners are just not getting vista because of the terrible DRM.AndyKH - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
I'm hoping ati will release a dual-tuner version (being able to tune 2 analog or digital channels at once). I will most likely buy an external version as it would be nice to stow away the (dual tuner) box by the tv-outlet and then just route the two video channels in one usb cable. Just to bad I would need to use repeaters if the distance is more than 5 metres - a gigabit ethernet version would certainly be better.tuteja1986 - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
yeah i been wanting a cheap decent dual tv tunner : ) i will just have to wifi bridge it if a ethernet is provide in the final cheap producttuteja1986 - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Me want one but i wonder how will it cost and should go along with my xbox 360 :)