EggXpert

Finally!!  It seems one may finally be able to get rid of the cable box and use a cablecard with a tv tuner. 

Already there are 2 new tuners in the works that you can plug a cablecard into.  One from Hauppauge and one from Ceton Corp.  As well as what ATI already has, though those tuners only existed in spendy oem systems with the first link is eliminating so I assume they will make a stand alone consumer cablecard tuner as well.  Personally I am most interested at present in the Ceton Corp card with the 4 simultaneous streams though I suspect a decent 4-core cpu will be needed to run all at once.  Plus Windows 7 will be needed for the 4 streams, though I had already decided I will upgrade to 7 on my htpc and my main pc.

That is great news.

The entire HTPC community had been waiting many many years for this.

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It sounds like the cards will not be cheap for the standard 4 stream/tuner card, between $300-$600 from the engadgetHD story.  Though I can say I would pay $400 right now for that card, probably more though not sure how much more.  I realize some people may balk at that kind of price but it is 4 HD tuners at once plus there is nothing else like it.  It would be the most expensive one part to my htpc, though not by much.    Besides I don't want cheap a$$ parts for the other components and this card appears to be a quality part from all that I have read/seen on it so far, well worth several hundred dollars.

Also in that story it sounds like they could have them by the end of the year but are going to wait until right after the turn of the year.  So it sounds a lot more like January in Q1 than March Q1.

How exciting to see this FINALLY happening!!!  We KNEW this was happening, our future!!!  Though I'm soo tempted to try, Imma wait for the price to come down though! lol!

 Yup! It's 4 HD tuners, but my DVR only costs 10 bucks a month. Two DVRs would be 20 bucks a month..... 400 dollars would be equivalent to 20 months of 2 DVRs..... What if I went Verizon instead of Time Warner Cable for premium channels?? *GAG*

 But if anybody gets this, please keep us updated!!! I'm very interested. At this point sure, people will surely couple this with a Blu-ray burner, BUT, what will people be using to record?  I mean does any soft other than Windows Media Center work with this?  If you use MC, you won' be able to cut out commercials from your recordings before burning to a Blu-ray disk??? I'm 'guessing' .WTV has built-in encryption to prevent conversions to DVR-MS or just editting in general for premium contents.

Hm.. I guess I will see. Very interesting post, thanks! xoxo