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Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way - Chris Lanier's Blog

Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way

CE Pro has the scoop, Media Center will soon support four CableCARD tuners!  Only problem? “Media Centers with four CableCARD tuners will be available only through custom installers” according to Scott Evans, Microsoft PM for eHome devices.

The first two to demo this are Niveus Media and Exceptional Innovation this week at CEDIA.  Great news, and in fact a much needed feature as time goes on.  I’ve talked about this before at The Green Button, but I don’t think I’ve touched on it as much here.  Now with support for four CableCARD tuners, Media Center is again aligning itself to take over your home assuming you want to have everything done by a custom installer.

I think it is ridiculous to limit this to custom installers; there should be little reason why it should not be offered as an option to end users.  The majority of buyers will likely go through installers, but limiting it to them is just stupid.  Instead of hitting both sides of the market, you are limiting it to one half?  Someone didn't think this through.  Tons of families have four Cable or Satellite set-top boxes in their homes, and this just limits all of them from upgrading to Vista with CableCARD.  Limiting this to CIs is just limiting Media Center from being in more peoples homes.  Bad choice, yet again Microsoft.

In addition, v2 Extenders (Pika) are being sort-of shown at CEDIA.  No partners names given yet, but I’d expect the usual suspects (Linksys, etc) to be planning them for the next few months.  They support HD and all that good stuff that we have been waiting for.

Published Wed, Sep 5 2007 10:37 by chrisl
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Comments

# re: Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way

What's the status on hacking current cablecards in a similiar way to regular tuners to get more than two?  I think the issue is getting more than two DCT tuners from an OEM...but shouldn't be simple registry "hacks"?

Wednesday, September 05, 2007 11:15 AM by Aaron

# re: Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way

MS might be limiting the market because of the difficulty getting CableCARD tuners to work at all.  They might not have the support resources to handle general availability, limiting it to custom installers is a natural way to throttle support.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007 11:36 AM by andy vt

# re: Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way

Aaron: That's a good question that I don't know.  I want to say that it was a hard limit in software until now.  I believe some of the CableLabs docs quoted that two tuners was the max, so I would think it was limited in software to comply with that.

Andy: It would seem so, but even CIs don't get access to installing the CableCARDs most of the time.  That's still on the Cable co, and while a CI might stick around and make sure they are doing it right, support is not done by them for this (they might act as a manager in the process, a nice benefit to the guy who paid $5k+ for the setup).

Wednesday, September 05, 2007 11:45 AM by chrisl

# re: Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way

Chris - it's limited because what these custom installers are doing is being done without an OS update. That means some of the UI - like conflict resolution - will not work properly. If you have four shows scheduled to record at a time, and you create a conflict at that time, you'll only see two in the UI. If/when we do this feature for the mainstream, we'll do it with software changes that will make situations like this work properly. And other things - like TV setup - haven't been modified to accommodate 4 tuners. What is being done for CIs is exactly what you have been doing for years with the registry hacks. The difference is CIs have access to CableCARD tuners.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007 11:54 AM by Jessica Zahn

# re: Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way

Oops, someone just told me that conflict management does (magically) work properly some of the time. But we still didn't make UI changes for this announcement, and we need to if we're going to support more tuners.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007 11:58 AM by Jessica Zahn

# re: Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way

Thanks for the information Jessica. (Updated for second post by Jess above)

It still doesn't seem right to me.  Getting four tuners out there is great (really, great job!), but now to hear that conflict resolution isn't going to work all the time.  So I spend the money to get a four CableCARD tuner PC installed by a CI, and the software might not work the same as it would with two tuners?  How are CIs going to support that if needed?  The same way that any of us would with four tuners hacked to work.  So why limit it?

I understand that Microsoft doesn't want to release a feature like this without it working 100%, but this still doesn't make sense.

If it is good enough for people paying $5-10k for a whole home setup, it should be good enough for me.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007 12:01 PM by chrisl

# re: Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way

Since when does everything we do make sense to everyone? :-)

Wednesday, September 05, 2007 1:28 PM by Jessica Zahn

# re: Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way

What a joke! Microsoft is building a great product off of communities of power users who spent thier money on mce equipment and showed MS how it needed to be. And now the thanks for that...."Hmmmm..Let's just give it all to custom installers and screw the user community." I think this is about the last straw for me! A custom installed 4 cablecard pc through the companies listed is going to be in the 7 to 10 thousand range.

Once again the rich get what we supported for years, and we are left to our dreams.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007 1:47 PM by GReg

# re: Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way

Jessica: I'm glad that I know you work very hard on the products in question, else you might not be getting this same reply from me.  :)

GReg: That's exactly how I feel about this.  It is like a slap in the face (again) to those who have already dropped $3,000 on a great machine just to know that the future (immediate at least) doesn't hold good things in terms of tuner support.  Slap in the face.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007 2:36 PM by chrisl

# re: Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way

I would like to know what the future holds for any possibility of Dish/DirecTV integration with MCE.  After moving to my new home I no longer have access to cable.  I have to utilize Dish.  My wonderful, homebuilt MCE box has gone from center stage in my video watching to an after-thought.

I want Dish support in my MCE. :(

Wednesday, September 05, 2007 4:39 PM by Bill Marczak

# re: Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way

Sadly, since DIRECTV and/or Dish are not as public as CableLabs, it is hard to pull bits out from PDFs and such.

Unlucky for us, we pretty much have to wait for DIRECTV to release information.  :(

I'm pushing for some more information too, it's just not there though.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007 4:46 PM by chrisl

# re: Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way

One more serious (i.e. not silly like I made above) comment from me:

I think it's a fairly common scenario that features are made available first to a limited market, then later made more widely available after a product group learns from the limited test. Right now, I know for a fact that the majority of Media Center systems still only have a single tuner! That's hard to believe if you're your or me, but true. So we're starting to test systems with greater than two tuners - remember, this involves not only a whole bunch of UI type changes in the OS, but also system configuration changes - memory, hard drives, etc - in order to ensure performance is acceptable. So to be honest, I think it makes sense that we start with a limited market. We know that you guys - enthusiasts - already know how to work around our 2 tuner limitation, but we have no idea what kind of systems you use to do so. As we start to play with this feature in the high end, we'll learn how to do it for the mass market. (Obviously I'm not promising we will...but that's because I can't promise anything!)

Friday, September 07, 2007 12:12 PM by Jessica Zahn

# re: Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way

Thanks Jessica.  I was going to write basically the same thing in my CEDIA wrap-up post.  While I don't agree that early adopters should be left out right now, I do believe that this will make it's way down.  Since it's no longer an issue with CableLabs (I assume) and you have already told us that it doesn't require massive software changes for the basic functionality, I can see it making the way down to us.

I'm still disappointed in this method, because it's yet another case where Microsoft is alienating it's user base.  This wouldn't be that big of an issue if it was the first time it has happened, but looking down the time of issues for people like me who have been covering this forever, it's just another slap in the face.

Only MCE upgrades to MCE 2004 until it shipped as part of a SP, no upgrade path to MCE 2005 without purchase of new OEM copy if your OEM didn't provide it.  No support in Vista for v1 Extenders.  Launching DVD changers and not following up on other features related (streaming), and the list goes on and on.

Friday, September 07, 2007 12:32 PM by chrisl

# re: Media Center to Support Four CableCARDs Tuners (Sort of); v2 Extenders on the Way

I am ordering two dell xps 410s and put the four tuners on one box. I cannot believe the conflict resolution problem is real. You can already order vista with two cable card tuners and two analog tuners already (velocitymicro). The cable card tuners are no different then the over the air digital tuners. (which can support four via hack). If you make the reg changes properly, it will not be a problem.

The only area I can think of for conflict problems is using the mis matched tuner config (which i have also experienced). This is because there is no way to specify tuner priority based on content. Meaning your HD tuner may be recording a low def show on digital when an HD show comes on. There are no smarts to figure out what type on content you are recording and switch to the appropriate tuner. Four cable card tuners will not have this problem.

one final thought, I may need to setup raid 0 is disk bandwidth becomes a problem.

Thursday, September 20, 2007 7:26 PM by tonyi