I'm in Long Island, NY and use Cablevision with my Tivo HD.
The Tivo uses a single multistream card to be able to tune two HD channels at once. Cablevision charges $2 a month for the card. I also have the SDV tuning adapter. Cablevision provides the adapter for free. Only one tuning adapter is needed for the M-stream card.
I did the lifetime service with the Tivo so basically my monthly costs are just the $2 per month for the M-stream card.
That's opposed to either two HD cable boxes which would cost about $20 per month (and would have no DVR capability) or Cablevision's DVR which I did not like and was about $10 a month.
Just a Quick FYI, with the Ceton and other cards that support M-cards, they will support 2 way communication and SDV without the tuning adapters. This is the other (and in my mind just as important) feature of the new tuners for win7. Cards in my area are also only $2 per month which is a lot less than the cable box rental fees.
When tuners become available I'll have to ditch Sage TV and switch back to Media Center. I really love Sage, but the ability to record encrypted HD is just too good to pass up.
You have to expect that SDV will make its way into the TV tuners made for computers, but it may take some time for this to happen. With newer technologies, and the allowance for cable TV operators to record at the company instead of just to set top boxes though, the demand for TV tuners may very well drop.
As far as the monthly charge from cable operators for CableCard use, I suspect a good reason for this is the higher cost of supporting these at this point. Think about it, how much does it cost to have the tech come to a house and set up the CableCard, which can take hours? $5 per month for you might only add up to less than a year, but there are other people out there who are involved in just getting the CableCard setup working for your installation, and the cable companies will want that cost covered. If CableCard were actually common, then the price might only be $1 per month instead of the $5 per month.
One reason we originally went with TiVo was that the cable co was charging $15 pm for a DVR. TiVo fee was only $13. Then came the cablecards. We then had to pay $4 for those - and the installation fee for a man to insert a cable card and call the cable co to activate it. All he did was read the information from the screen. Something I could easily have done from home. He left and we "hoped" the card would activate in a few hours.
Now, with SDV, I have to get ANOTHER box from the cable co. I'm sure there will be another fee for that.
Of course the HUGE advantage of having a DVR (either cable co or mine) in the house and not at the Cable headend is that when we loose cable service (which is frequently with Charter) we can still watch shows that we have already recorded. If the show is held at the headend, then I am without any TV.
From what SocrPlyr said, it sounds like the Tuning adapter/resolver/Tru2way or whatever they are calling it this week, could be attached with just one card no matter how many tuners the machine has built in 2,3,4.... Of course, that would be a revenue drop for the Cable co so I'm pretty sure that that will not happen.
The 2 way part has not bothered me yet because the only thing that I am missing with TiVo is the VOD option, which whenever we have tried using it in the past it has not worked. we always receive communication errors or they double bill us for watching a show more than once within a 24 hour period, so we just stopped using it. Now we just use Amazon VOD.
The tuning adapter is what you need for SDV. It'll be a cable box like thing, hooked up to your computer, and inline on the Coax cable. It'll support as many tuners as you've got. Well, well it isn't crashing. Yes its a horrible kludge. Yes they may charge you a rental fee. For now it can't be built into the computer. Your cable company is again required to make this available to you, though they may tell you otherwise.
tru2way is what you need to do VOD/On Demand. It would also allow you to get rid of that ridiculous tuning adapter. Mostly it isn't supported yet. A few TVs support it and a few cable systems support it, but that's all.
I have a 5TB windows home server rig...fully supports storage and sharing of recorded TV programs, an AT&T CE device using Microsoft MediaRoom to tune U-verse, and an Xbox 360...which was shown at the 2007 CES using MS MediaRoom Software to tune IPTV and the supposedly be able to store it on a Home Server.
So it would seem to make more sense if MS would simply use the 360's as a TiVO competitor, storing Recordings on the HDD or Server, instead of taking it the HTPC Route. Especially since they stand to gain more from selling a hardware/software solution than a software only solution.
All of that being said, I'm personally tired of having 3 different Microsoft machines plugged into my TV + a server, when they have overlapping capabilities.
Call me crazy, but even though I have a 680i q6600 1.6TB rig with blu-ray asus zonar, and the whole bit running to my 1080p plasma and 7.1 DTS/Dolby-MA Tuner as my HTPC, I think that the ideal way for MS to position itself would be to promote the idea of using the server itself to tune tv, and then stream it in extender fashion to the Xbox 360s. Or at the very least have a single HTPC decked out for TV Reception, storing on the server and accessible to any 360 as an extender.
I guess my real concern, if this new tuner actually pans out is
1: will be able to store my recordings on the server and then access them via 360?
2:will I be able to record 4 or more channels at a time?
If not then this is as much of a turd in the punch bowl as ATI's Occur, and no advantage at all to my current AT&T provided IPTV DVR.
"I think that the ideal way for MS to position itself would be to promote the idea of using the server itself to tune tv, and then stream it in extender fashion to the Xbox 360s."
Great idea, but since MS Home Server 1.0 was based upon Win2003, it doesn't support drivers for most of the modern tuners, and doesn't have the requisite DRM.
Sites like this speculate that MS Home Server 2.0 (or whatever) might be able to do this, but who knows when.
Blame CableLabs and their stringent requirements and horrendous qualification process for that. They are such paranoid tools. CableCard should have been available to Media Center and other media apps years ago.
I am definitely looking forward to this, have been using a hauppauge pvr 1212, for a while and it works pretty well but cablecard support would be better (and mean one less component to worry about). Main question I have is on, on demand. Currently ati's occur only works in 1 direction so it can't handle on demand, I would much prefer any cable card option I buy to be able to fully replace the cable (or fios) box. Does anyone know what the situation with on demand would be with the new cablecard tuners?
You can't handle On Demand access with this setup. You need support for the whole tru2way Java machine, which wasn't announced here, to get that. Even Tivo hasn't announced their "Series 4" that will supposedly support that, and in fact the cable industry is way behind in their promised support for this (might mean its dead). We'll see whether Sony/Panasonic et al deliver any TVs with tru2way support this Christmas/next CES. That'll give you a general hint.
For now if you want On Demand, you need a STB.
The other way this *might* work is that the whole TV anywhere thing *might* allow you to access the on demand content over the internet if you're a cable TV customer. Sort of a private Hulu sort of thing. Too early to tell.
Well, I had long thought that I would eventually have to ditch my HTPC (at least the TV functionality) when i wanted to fully transition over to digital cable. With this annoucement that need not occur and I am actually excited. I have been using a MediaCenter PC for about 4-5 years now and do really like all the functionality and such. If I can by two digital tuners and slap a cable card in, that would be great!
You state, "Since the supported tuners are all unidirectional, this will require additional hardware through the use of rented Tuning Resolvers, with one resolver required per tuner."
First off the industry has (about a year ago) stopped using the term resolver and started using adapter so it is "Tuning Adapter." Second, your information seems incorrect as the tuning adapter already support working with at least two tuners (e.g. TivoHD). Now I do not know exactly how they are set up, but maybe they meant per separate tuning card / device.
I do not know how they decided to make the tuning adapters work, but if they do in fact require multiple to be connected to the same PC it is a complete waste. All the adapter does is gets a channel map, requests channels, receives tuning information about requested channels, and reports if channels are still in use. Under those requirements it would have been insanely stupid of them if it can't work with multiple tuners as the functions are all completely independent of the tuners (as they don't need a tuner to do anything, although without a tuner you have no need to request the channels). Now that being said I am sure they came up with some stupid way of making them that there are drawbacks and isn't as simple as I just made it out to be. However, it seems illogical that they would go a step backwards from what the Tivo has already implemented.
SocrPlyr, thank you for that information. I actually wasn't aware Tuning Adapter had replaced Resolver as the preferred terminology, so that has been corrected.
As for the number of Adapters needed, my contact had originally told me that it was one per tuner, which is why I wrote what I wrote. This appears to have been an error in communication (i.e. they meant something else) and we now seem to be in agreement that a computer will only need 1 Adapter. The article has been corrected as such.
This is what I came to get clarification on - each cable card gets one TA or a M-stream cable card would need between 2 or 4 TAs depending on how many streams the host adapter (PCI-E CableCard host) can handle.
I just setup my DIY CableCard HTPC yesterday and am LOVING it. One thing that I keep getting though is channel dropouts, so I'm getting an amplifier to fix that.
OK, you do not need to have a PVR to use these. Because you are going to place this into your computer. If you read the article, you would see these will be available retail, to purchase!.
With the recent release of the ambarella chipset, it's now feasible for consumers to affordably encode HD through the analog hole. It'll only get cheaper as time passes and other competitors release chips capable of realtime HD encoding at consumer-friendly prices.
You need to read more about CableCards. You can already receive the unencrypted channels with a simple Clear QAM tuner. CableCards let you receive the encrypted channels.
Not only that, but the CableCARD rental fee is close to the full cable box rental fee. Worse yet, a quick look at my Time Warner channel lineup indicates that of our ~90 HD channels, only 11 are available through CableCARD... 5 local stations, ESPN, 4 pay movie channels, and the Time Warner news channel. So, not exactly opening up the world of HD programming to my computer.
Hauppauge PVR-1212 seems like the solution everyone should be looking at, at least to record HD. Take the component stream right from the cable box.
The other channels are PROBABLY being switched using Switched Digital Video (SDV) in your area. Time Warner in particular has been relatively aggressive about rolling out SDV. It allows them to change the logical binding between a channel ("HBO", Channel 510) and the frequency and program number it is bound to (587MHz, Program 2). Basically it means that any SDV channel that isn't being watched by anybody in your neighbourhood doesn't take any bandwidth. And the channels that are being watched can be in different places on the cable each time.
This is what the Tuning Adapters are for. Windows 7 is going to support these. Yes its stupid. You'll need BOTH a cable card to decode the channels AND an external set top box (sort of, at least it looks like one) to handle the channel changing. Yes it can handle multiple channels at the same time. It basically sends your request for the channel upstream. They're supposed to rent you these for FREE. We'll see how that works out in general.
Go on over to the Tivo forums and you'll see what fun people are having with these things. That'll be you when this support rolls out.
So now it is 2010 and Charter is telling me that my cable card will "lose access to a growing number of digital subscription channels". However, they can not tell me if I subscribe to any of these channels currently. So, they want to replace my $2/month cable card with a $10/month digital HD receiver. They cannot or will not tell me specifically what I will be missing out on or why the cable card will no longer be able to support those channels. Is this a ploy to increase rental fees or is there truly no cable card that can provide these channels? In addition to paying an additional $8/month for a box, I have to have a box and the room to put the box and access to the signal receiver for the remote to the box (i.e. an open cabinet door or an ir transmitter?). Anyone know why my cable card will no longer work? Isn't this going against the MOU on cable cards? Help me out here people. Thanks.
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mikepers - Friday, September 18, 2009 - link
I'm in Long Island, NY and use Cablevision with my Tivo HD.The Tivo uses a single multistream card to be able to tune two HD channels at once. Cablevision charges $2 a month for the card. I also have the SDV tuning adapter. Cablevision provides the adapter for free. Only one tuning adapter is needed for the M-stream card.
I did the lifetime service with the Tivo so basically my monthly costs are just the $2 per month for the M-stream card.
That's opposed to either two HD cable boxes which would cost about $20 per month (and would have no DVR capability) or Cablevision's DVR which I did not like and was about $10 a month.
platinum1 - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 - link
Just a Quick FYI, with the Ceton and other cards that support M-cards, they will support 2 way communication and SDV without the tuning adapters. This is the other (and in my mind just as important) feature of the new tuners for win7. Cards in my area are also only $2 per month which is a lot less than the cable box rental fees.RickNY - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
How do you figure they wont require the tuning adapter? M-cards does not equal two-way communication with the head-end.jasonbird - Friday, December 25, 2009 - link
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DFranch - Thursday, September 17, 2009 - link
When tuners become available I'll have to ditch Sage TV and switch back to Media Center. I really love Sage, but the ability to record encrypted HD is just too good to pass up.ap90033 - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
I hope this isnt stupid but will this work with Dish Network or Direct TV? Will it do HD and SD and allow for multiple recordings at the same time?bobbozzo - Thursday, September 17, 2009 - link
Dish and DTV don't use QAM, so no, this won't work to tune them.ap90033 - Friday, September 18, 2009 - link
Well that is useless to me, and many then. Thanks.Targon - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
You have to expect that SDV will make its way into the TV tuners made for computers, but it may take some time for this to happen. With newer technologies, and the allowance for cable TV operators to record at the company instead of just to set top boxes though, the demand for TV tuners may very well drop.As far as the monthly charge from cable operators for CableCard use, I suspect a good reason for this is the higher cost of supporting these at this point. Think about it, how much does it cost to have the tech come to a house and set up the CableCard, which can take hours? $5 per month for you might only add up to less than a year, but there are other people out there who are involved in just getting the CableCard setup working for your installation, and the cable companies will want that cost covered. If CableCard were actually common, then the price might only be $1 per month instead of the $5 per month.
agsGeoff - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
I am with Charter, and they charge $2 per card.One reason we originally went with TiVo was that the cable co was charging $15 pm for a DVR. TiVo fee was only $13. Then came the cablecards. We then had to pay $4 for those - and the installation fee for a man to insert a cable card and call the cable co to activate it. All he did was read the information from the screen. Something I could easily have done from home. He left and we "hoped" the card would activate in a few hours.
Now, with SDV, I have to get ANOTHER box from the cable co. I'm sure there will be another fee for that.
Of course the HUGE advantage of having a DVR (either cable co or mine) in the house and not at the Cable headend is that when we loose cable service (which is frequently with Charter) we can still watch shows that we have already recorded. If the show is held at the headend, then I am without any TV.
From what SocrPlyr said, it sounds like the Tuning adapter/resolver/Tru2way or whatever they are calling it this week, could be attached with just one card no matter how many tuners the machine has built in 2,3,4.... Of course, that would be a revenue drop for the Cable co so I'm pretty sure that that will not happen.
The 2 way part has not bothered me yet because the only thing that I am missing with TiVo is the VOD option, which whenever we have tried using it in the past it has not worked. we always receive communication errors or they double bill us for watching a show more than once within a 24 hour period, so we just stopped using it. Now we just use Amazon VOD.
Fanfoot - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link
The tuning adapter is what you need for SDV. It'll be a cable box like thing, hooked up to your computer, and inline on the Coax cable. It'll support as many tuners as you've got. Well, well it isn't crashing. Yes its a horrible kludge. Yes they may charge you a rental fee. For now it can't be built into the computer. Your cable company is again required to make this available to you, though they may tell you otherwise.tru2way is what you need to do VOD/On Demand. It would also allow you to get rid of that ridiculous tuning adapter. Mostly it isn't supported yet. A few TVs support it and a few cable systems support it, but that's all.
shortark - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
I have a 5TB windows home server rig...fully supports storage and sharing of recorded TV programs, an AT&T CE device using Microsoft MediaRoom to tune U-verse, and an Xbox 360...which was shown at the 2007 CES using MS MediaRoom Software to tune IPTV and the supposedly be able to store it on a Home Server.So it would seem to make more sense if MS would simply use the 360's as a TiVO competitor, storing Recordings on the HDD or Server, instead of taking it the HTPC Route. Especially since they stand to gain more from selling a hardware/software solution than a software only solution.
All of that being said, I'm personally tired of having 3 different Microsoft machines plugged into my TV + a server, when they have overlapping capabilities.
Call me crazy, but even though I have a 680i q6600 1.6TB rig with blu-ray asus zonar, and the whole bit running to my 1080p plasma and 7.1 DTS/Dolby-MA Tuner as my HTPC, I think that the ideal way for MS to position itself would be to promote the idea of using the server itself to tune tv, and then stream it in extender fashion to the Xbox 360s. Or at the very least have a single HTPC decked out for TV Reception, storing on the server and accessible to any 360 as an extender.
I guess my real concern, if this new tuner actually pans out is
1: will be able to store my recordings on the server and then access them via 360?
2:will I be able to record 4 or more channels at a time?
If not then this is as much of a turd in the punch bowl as ATI's Occur, and no advantage at all to my current AT&T provided IPTV DVR.
bobbozzo - Thursday, September 17, 2009 - link
"I think that the ideal way for MS to position itself would be to promote the idea of using the server itself to tune tv, and then stream it in extender fashion to the Xbox 360s."Great idea, but since MS Home Server 1.0 was based upon Win2003, it doesn't support drivers for most of the modern tuners, and doesn't have the requisite DRM.
Sites like this speculate that MS Home Server 2.0 (or whatever) might be able to do this, but who knows when.
johnsonx - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
Of course it must be noted that this is a Microsoft Only development. Those of us who prefer 3rd party PVR apps will have no recourse.sbrown23 - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
Blame CableLabs and their stringent requirements and horrendous qualification process for that. They are such paranoid tools. CableCard should have been available to Media Center and other media apps years ago.petersterncan - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
"To be frank, we’re not sure what Microsoft has done to get CableLabs to loosen their grip on matters. "I bet you they made them an offer "they couldn't refuse"... hee hee hee...
jkresh - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
I am definitely looking forward to this, have been using a hauppauge pvr 1212, for a while and it works pretty well but cablecard support would be better (and mean one less component to worry about). Main question I have is on, on demand. Currently ati's occur only works in 1 direction so it can't handle on demand, I would much prefer any cable card option I buy to be able to fully replace the cable (or fios) box. Does anyone know what the situation with on demand would be with the new cablecard tuners?Fanfoot - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link
You can't handle On Demand access with this setup. You need support for the whole tru2way Java machine, which wasn't announced here, to get that. Even Tivo hasn't announced their "Series 4" that will supposedly support that, and in fact the cable industry is way behind in their promised support for this (might mean its dead). We'll see whether Sony/Panasonic et al deliver any TVs with tru2way support this Christmas/next CES. That'll give you a general hint.For now if you want On Demand, you need a STB.
The other way this *might* work is that the whole TV anywhere thing *might* allow you to access the on demand content over the internet if you're a cable TV customer. Sort of a private Hulu sort of thing. Too early to tell.
cbuchach - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
Well, I had long thought that I would eventually have to ditch my HTPC (at least the TV functionality) when i wanted to fully transition over to digital cable. With this annoucement that need not occur and I am actually excited. I have been using a MediaCenter PC for about 4-5 years now and do really like all the functionality and such. If I can by two digital tuners and slap a cable card in, that would be great!SocrPlyr - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
Ryan,You state, "Since the supported tuners are all unidirectional, this will require additional hardware through the use of rented Tuning Resolvers, with one resolver required per tuner."
First off the industry has (about a year ago) stopped using the term resolver and started using adapter so it is "Tuning Adapter." Second, your information seems incorrect as the tuning adapter already support working with at least two tuners (e.g. TivoHD). Now I do not know exactly how they are set up, but maybe they meant per separate tuning card / device.
I do not know how they decided to make the tuning adapters work, but if they do in fact require multiple to be connected to the same PC it is a complete waste. All the adapter does is gets a channel map, requests channels, receives tuning information about requested channels, and reports if channels are still in use. Under those requirements it would have been insanely stupid of them if it can't work with multiple tuners as the functions are all completely independent of the tuners (as they don't need a tuner to do anything, although without a tuner you have no need to request the channels). Now that being said I am sure they came up with some stupid way of making them that there are drawbacks and isn't as simple as I just made it out to be. However, it seems illogical that they would go a step backwards from what the Tivo has already implemented.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
SocrPlyr, thank you for that information. I actually wasn't aware Tuning Adapter had replaced Resolver as the preferred terminology, so that has been corrected.As for the number of Adapters needed, my contact had originally told me that it was one per tuner, which is why I wrote what I wrote. This appears to have been an error in communication (i.e. they meant something else) and we now seem to be in agreement that a computer will only need 1 Adapter. The article has been corrected as such.
Doormat - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
This is what I came to get clarification on - each cable card gets one TA or a M-stream cable card would need between 2 or 4 TAs depending on how many streams the host adapter (PCI-E CableCard host) can handle.greylica - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
Finnaly, their ridiculous DRM VIsta Imposition found it's way into Win 7.dagamer34 - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
I just setup my DIY CableCard HTPC yesterday and am LOVING it. One thing that I keep getting though is channel dropouts, so I'm getting an amplifier to fix that.I can't wait for Windows 7. It's gonna be great!
vwgtiron - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
OK, you do not need to have a PVR to use these. Because you are going to place this into your computer. If you read the article, you would see these will be available retail, to purchase!.schizoide - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
With the recent release of the ambarella chipset, it's now feasible for consumers to affordably encode HD through the analog hole. It'll only get cheaper as time passes and other competitors release chips capable of realtime HD encoding at consumer-friendly prices.Spivonious - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
Finally the cable companies will have some competition to their $5-$10 per month box rentals.And my HTPC will finally be able to watch and record non ClearQAM channels.
It's a good day for media!
dfedders - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
Sure, if you mean by charging $5 a month for a cablecard... :)Aeternum - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
Well your lucky then cause we need to have their box to descramble the channels anyway. Though it would save on the need to get their pvr i suppose :PSpivonious - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
You need to read more about CableCards. You can already receive the unencrypted channels with a simple Clear QAM tuner. CableCards let you receive the encrypted channels.rikulus - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
Not only that, but the CableCARD rental fee is close to the full cable box rental fee. Worse yet, a quick look at my Time Warner channel lineup indicates that of our ~90 HD channels, only 11 are available through CableCARD... 5 local stations, ESPN, 4 pay movie channels, and the Time Warner news channel. So, not exactly opening up the world of HD programming to my computer.Hauppauge PVR-1212 seems like the solution everyone should be looking at, at least to record HD. Take the component stream right from the cable box.
Fanfoot - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link
The other channels are PROBABLY being switched using Switched Digital Video (SDV) in your area. Time Warner in particular has been relatively aggressive about rolling out SDV. It allows them to change the logical binding between a channel ("HBO", Channel 510) and the frequency and program number it is bound to (587MHz, Program 2). Basically it means that any SDV channel that isn't being watched by anybody in your neighbourhood doesn't take any bandwidth. And the channels that are being watched can be in different places on the cable each time.This is what the Tuning Adapters are for. Windows 7 is going to support these. Yes its stupid. You'll need BOTH a cable card to decode the channels AND an external set top box (sort of, at least it looks like one) to handle the channel changing. Yes it can handle multiple channels at the same time. It basically sends your request for the channel upstream. They're supposed to rent you these for FREE. We'll see how that works out in general.
Go on over to the Tivo forums and you'll see what fun people are having with these things. That'll be you when this support rolls out.
Dabler37 - Thursday, September 23, 2010 - link
So now it is 2010 and Charter is telling me that my cable card will "lose access to a growing number of digital subscription channels". However, they can not tell me if I subscribe to any of these channels currently. So, they want to replace my $2/month cable card with a $10/month digital HD receiver. They cannot or will not tell me specifically what I will be missing out on or why the cable card will no longer be able to support those channels. Is this a ploy to increase rental fees or is there truly no cable card that can provide these channels? In addition to paying an additional $8/month for a box, I have to have a box and the room to put the box and access to the signal receiver for the remote to the box (i.e. an open cabinet door or an ir transmitter?). Anyone know why my cable card will no longer work? Isn't this going against the MOU on cable cards? Help me out here people. Thanks.aletacordell - Saturday, April 16, 2016 - link
Useful article , I am thankful for the details , Does someone know if my business might obtain a blank a form form to edit ?