Evidently there are some piracy concerns, of which we think are silly, but CableLabs seemed open to reviewing the requirement. This spec was written for single tuner cards and we reached out to CableLabs about changing it.
TV TUNER PCI CARD REVIEWS PC
This feature probably won't be used by many because the current DRI spec(PDF) from CableLabs requires that all four of the InfiniTV's tuners be paired to the same Media Center PC (REQ214).
TV TUNER PCI CARD REVIEWS WINDOWS 7
And although we were able to access the card's web interface from another PC, we didn't have another Windows 7 PC to try and record with. Since the InfiniTV 4 shows up like a gig NIC in Windows, we were able to bridge it with the NIC connected to our network. The good news is the FCC recognizes that they don't work and already has plans to require an alternative based on IP, which will hopefully be deployed by this Fall.Īnother thing we didn't get to test was the network bridging support. These boxes are nothing but trouble for TiVo owners and when we tested the ATI CableCARD tuner, our luck wasn't much better. If you have a Motorola TA, one will do, but if it is a Cisco, you'll need two of 'em - you can use a splitter instead of the RF pass through as all the data to the PC is sent via USB. Basically a Tuning Adapter looks like a regular cable set-top box with a USB port and has an RF pass through. When the tuner ships in May we expect to have more time to play so we have more tests planned.
We didn't have time to test with another provider and since FiOS doesn't use SDV, we didn't get to test how it works with a Tuning Adapter. Notice the CCI is set to Copy Freely 0x00 and the next is so you can look at each of the four tuners. In the end the InfiniTV 4 just does what it's told, and although we hate DRM, it is pretty cool to think that this device can decrypt four HD shows at once and re-encrypt them with PlayReady DRM in real time. This really comes down to which provider you use and what contracts they have with the content creators. Sadly some providers mark everything Copy Once (0x01) which means the content is pretty much locked down. This obviously gives you a more flexible solution and allows you to use a PC as an extender or automatically skip commercials with a little help from DVRMSToolBox and ShowAnalyzer. Copy Freely (0x00) really means the recordings are DRM free. If you're lucky your provider marks everything Copy Freely so you'll be able to play recordings on any Windows 7 PC in the house, or even convert them to playback on just about anything under the sun. The InfiniTV 4 is written to the latest CableLabs specs which means it supports SDV via Tuning Adapters and honors all Copy Control Information. Our XPS 420's dedicated 1TB drive managed to keep up, the MC interface did slow down a bit, but no frames or pixels were dropped. The good news is that with this little fix in place all the channels looked perfect and we didn't have any problems recording six HD shows at once (two with an HDHomeRun) and playing back four.
TV TUNER PCI CARD REVIEWS INSTALL
We just disabled the MoCA LAN interface since we don't use it, but you can also use a different MoCA channel or install a low pass filter. The helpful Ceton support crew really came though and discovered that MoCA traffic on channel 1150Mhz was the culprit. A few online searches reveled that it is actually a pretty common issue with other 3rd party CableCARD devices. We were seeing macroblocking on just five channels, come to find out our FiOS MoCA router was causing interference.
There really isn't anything more fascinating to share about it, but we can say that in the short time we had to evaluate the card, we only had one problem. In use the InfiniTV 4 is like any other good HTPC tuner, it just works.
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