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CableCARD now a go for homebrew home theater PCs

Content restrictions rarely get more liberal, which is what made a joint …

Here's something you don't see every day: companies like Microsoft and the cable industry relaxing content and DRM restrictions. But that's exactly what happened yesterday at the CEDIA EXPO trade show in Atlanta, where Microsoft announced that home users could now install CableCARD-powered digital TV tuners in their PCs, could use those tuners with switched digital video (SDV) cable systems, and could use recorded content more freely.

These might not sound like terrific changes, but they're significant relaxations of the existing CableCARD rules. CableLabs, the research and development consortium funded by the cable industry, developed and now licenses the CableCARD spec. In 2006, when CableCARD-ready tuners came to home computers, CableLabs decided it would be too much a risk to let such tuners be installed "in the wild" by customers. Instead, only specific computer configurations would be certified for use with such devices—CableLabs wanted to audit the systems to ensure a totally protected content path from tuner to computer to monitor.

This was terrifically bad for enthusiasts who wanted to use the excellent Windows Media Center software on their PCs to watch and record digital cable channels. It meant that only new computers from selected manufacturers would be approved and would come with a CableCARD-ready tuner preinstalled. Buying a new computer wasn't feasible for many people, of course, and in 2006 it was also less likely that any particular user would own an HDCP-compliant monitor.


The newly relaxed restrictions mean that users can now install tuners themselves, but "piracy paranoia" hasn't disappeared completely. Microsoft says it will offer a "new tool" that "assesses the PC's ability to support the solution." In other words, the protected path certification process isn't so much going away as moving into software. Still, it's a step forward for those looking to add a CableCARD device to an existing machine.

Media Center in Windows 7 will also support switched digital video, answering the cries of those hardy few who had been using Media Center with their cable service—until the cable service changed. SDV, like IPTV, is a way of saving bandwidth by "switching" the video at the local office instead of just blasting every single channel to every home all the time. Existing TV tuners don't know how to request channel changes on such systems and so fail to work properly with cable networks that adopt an SDV architecture.

Users willing to attach one more piece of hardware to their computers (a "tuning adapter" that interfaces with the tuning card) will soon be able to address SDV networks under Windows 7.

Finally, Microsoft and CableLabs have agreed to remove many of the restrictions on recorded TV content that is tagged "copy freely." Most shows contain a brief code allowing or restricting such copies, but Media Center has had a habit of locking down all content.

One of my biggest beefs with the last Zune rollout was the fact that Microsoft had created the perfect vehicle for getting high-quality TV onto a portable device—and doing it for free, rather than charging $1.99 an episode like iTunes—and utterly failed to capitalize. Media Center records digital content from over-the-air tuners beautifully, but it locks it all down and would not even allow automatic transfer to a Zune.


The new setup appears to remove some of these restrictions depending on the how the copy control bits are set for each show.

All this is good news for Media Center fans. Though the "home theater PC" movement never became more than a niche, Microsoft has hit on a strategy for making Media Center useful: the Xbox 360 interface. The computer can be in any room, recording away in full HD on cheap, bog-standard hard drives, then streaming recorded shows to the 360 for display on the TV set in the living room. It's a far more practical solution that the idea of a separate HTPC sitting beside the TV set ever was, and the DVR guide data continues to be free, making it a good deal as well. So long as you can get a wired 100Mbps+ ethernet connection between the two machines, it works beautifully, and should now work even better under Windows 7.

Listing image by Wikimedia Commons

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Channel Ars Technica