First BOCR Details Emerge from Ceton Corp

re: First BOCR Details Emerge from Ceton Corp

Jeremy Hammer — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 06:13:40 GMT

Hi everyone!

My name is Jeremy Hammer. I am VP of System Integration and an engineer here at Ceton Corp working on the new Multi-Channel CableCARD tuner with M-Card support. I'm sorry if we have not answered your email, we try to respond as quickly as possible. We have been a little busy here lately as you can imagine :)

First I would like to address when we are planning to release our products. We plan on having a Multi-OCUR (MOCUR) device certified by CableLabs early in 2008 with production shortly thereafter.

As for BOCR, we have been doing development and plan on releasing this product as soon as CableLabs has finalized the spec and will certify it. Unfortunately we do not have control over the timing of this, but rest assured we will be ready when they do.

We have made a modular design of our multi-channel DCT with the main device having support for two channels and less expensive "daughter" cards adding two channels at a time up to six. These "daughter" cards plug into the main device and do not have any extra Coax connectors and do not need another CableCARD. This will allow you to record and/or stream six HD1080i streams WITH ONE CABLECARD.

We would like to offer our products both through pre-built Media PCs as well as standalone. Again this decision is not up to us, but the recent news about Sony selling the ATI DCT by itself is promising.

We are a relatively small company and have a lot of pride in our work. We believe in doing the job right, and we have extremely high standards. I hope you will be happy with what we have done and of course we welcome your suggestions.

Thanks!

-Jeremy

Apple Blog » Blog Archive » First Details on CableCard, Part 2

Apple Blog » Blog Archive » First Details on CableCard, Part 2 — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:58:12 GMT

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re: First BOCR Details Emerge from Ceton Corp

chrisl — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:17:12 GMT

Not really sure about most of your reply. OCUR is shipping and has been for a long time. All this stuff currently works and has nothing to do with "streaming" over HDMI-HDCP. We are not talking about using a distbrution amp and running HDMI or using component baluns. This solution uses standard CAT5.

The point of OCUR (or BCOR) is to enable cable content to be brought into a PC and streamed to compabile device. This is not a violation of HDCP, and has nothing to do with HD DVD or Blu-ray.

Content is wrapped in WMDRM and streamed that way. There is nothing new about this, PCs have been shipping for nearly a year doing it. Nothing new.

It has nothing to do with HDMI either, though on digital outputs either locally on the PC or on an Extender (like Xbox 360), HDCP is needed for the output.

Also, your understanding of HDMI and audio is incorrect. If your sources are DVD and HDTV, AC3 is only in question and is not is 48KHz max. HDMI carries this fine, as does SPDIF as you say. None of those sources have anything greater. That said, HD DVD and Blu-ray can. If you want more information on what HDMI is for these, search HDMI 1.3 on this site and I have a post all about it.

re: First BOCR Details Emerge from Ceton Corp

Nick Johnson — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:00:07 GMT

Regarding this comment:

"By definition, and OCUR . . . It provides multi-user, multi-room scenarios where the content flows over IP to a Home Media Server (HMS)."

Are you saying there will be a way to display HD content (from an HD STB or HDDVD or Blue Ray) on multiple displays throughout the home?

To do that without violating the HDCP license it seems a server would have to receive the HDMI HDCP encrypted streams doing all the handshaking and decryption and then create a separate stream for each display and encrypt it via HDCP to send to each display location.

I don't think this is likely to happen - at least not in most homes - and the compromise of HDMI's point to point limitation and being tied to one display in the entire home seems ludicrous.

Seven years ago I set up my system with 4 Tivo's, a STB and a DVD player in a closet where the selected output is modulated back onto a channel on our cable system so whatever we watch appears on all TV's in the house. It's like watching live TV. I would not give that benefit and convenience up for the absurd "benefits" claimed by HDMI - mainly what's called "HD Audio" with it's 8 channels of uncompressed audio sampled at 192 KHz which I am convinced no human alive can distinguish from 48 KHz audio.

My solution is to not use HDMI and its HD Audio and distribute s/pdif and component video

around my home instead.

If anyone thinks this is a big compromise they need to read a little communication theory - particularly the Nyquist theorem - and they'll discover 48 KHz sampling can reproduce 24 KHz audio perfectly and no human can hear 24 KHz audio! Most of us do well to hear 20KHz and microphones and speakers usually can't even handle 20 KHz so sampling above 48 KHz is a joke to most engineers and pure specsmanship in consumer products.

re: First BOCR Details Emerge from Ceton Corp

chrisl — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 18:34:21 GMT

No, BOCR will require hardware changes. OCURs are unidirectional by nature, there are significant changes that happen to make it a BOCR. The fact that the specs are not near complete wouldn't look good for the OCUR upgrade concept either. I've got some OCUR upgrade info that will come short, but BOCR doesn't equal OCUR in the hardware department at all.

re: First BOCR Details Emerge from Ceton Corp

dondu — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 18:21:20 GMT

If it takes a while for the BOCR spec to get finalized, it wouldn't surprise me if Ceton starts offering this new card as an OCUR card in the meantime.

If they are lucky then, future support for BOCR might come from new firmware/drivers and not require any hardware changes.

(Heck, even ATI's DCT might get BOCR support through new firmware. We just don't know.)

--Don

re: First BOCR Details Emerge from Ceton Corp

chrisl — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:18:18 GMT

BOCR has nothing to do with OCAP STBs. BOCR is the upgrade to OCUR, a PC specific spec only. CableLabs has yet to finish (or announce) the BOCR specs. OCAP STBs don't use any part of the BOCR (or OCUR) specs as it is a PC spec. In other words, bidriectional OCAP STBs don't use the upcoming BCOR specs. They use the existing OpenCable whatever specs as defined by CableLabs.

By definition, and OCUR (and thereforce BOCR) is a digital cable receiver with a tuner that has a CableCARD interface and an IP interface. It provides multi-user, multi-room scenarios where the content flows over IP to a Home Media Server (HMS). An HMS is specifically a Windows Vista PC.

I don't think we know what the EPG will look like yet, but my guess is that it will not differ much on the outside from what you see now.

re: First BOCR Details Emerge from Ceton Corp

Ben Drawbaugh — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 14:47:44 GMT

Hmm, with TWC deploying OCAP STBs I find your statement about BOCR not being ready confusing. Are you saying that once again, big cable can deploy OCAP STBs that are BOCR, but not 3rd parties, because CableLabs has yet to complete the 3rd party spec?

The other thought that makes me cringe is seeing a cable co's extremely ugly EPG showing up in a 'plug-in' and the fantastic Media Center UI.

re: First BOCR Details Emerge from Ceton Corp

sfiorito — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 05:08:21 GMT

Wow, this is great news....Guess I'll be waiting for a while longer. Wonder if this is what pushed Sony to sell standalone DCTs, Okoro to sell an "affordable" system, no DCTs in the XPS 420, etc.?