ATI's OCUR Brings CableCard and HDTV Support to Windows Vista
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 5, 2006 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
OCUR in Action
The tuner is completely controlled by Windows Vista's media center interface, you don't have to treat it any differently once you've got it setup. 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.
The demonstration was run on a special build of Vista with support for the external tuner:
As you can see, we had no problem watching HD content and the device worked as seamlessly as expected in Vista.
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.
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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.