S1Digital's impressive new lineup of Media Centers

Media Centers are so in now and that you have to really do something to make your black box stand out, and S1Digital's new lineup of media centers and servers does just that. Actually there are two series, the ProLine for professional installers and home automation companies and the Home Series for the rest of us. The Home Series includes the Platinum, Gold and Mighty editions, all running Core 2 Duo processors and Vista Home Premium. The Mighty is the size of a book and includes built in WiFi and DVD burner. Up next is the Gold, which is a more traditional size and adds up to 1TB of storage, HDMI, 2 ATSC and 2 NTSC tuners (sorry no CableCARD here), 7.1 audio and Viiv. The Platinum tops the Home Series, adding a quiet design an internal scaler and optional HD DVD or Blu-ray drive. But they don't stop there and are trying to join Niveus in the high end market with the ProLine Series, which of course does everything the Home series does, but with Vista Ultimate, rack mountable, a silent design and two-way control for all your favorite home automation systems like Crestron and AMX. As impressive as this lineup is, we are once again left wonder, where are the CableCARDs?

Read: S1Digital Introduces the Home Series Line of Media Centers
Read: S1Digital Sets a New Reference Standard with ProLine Series Media Centers

[AndyG @ Feb 22nd 2007 2:03AM]

Here's what confuses me. My Philips 42PF9631D Plasma TV has a built in ATSC tuner (but not CableCard) yet I get all the channels I need to via Time Warner Cable including all the networks in HD without using a cable box.

I want to get a Vista Media Center that has the same type of tuner, but all of the currently available HD Tuner cards for computers say that their ATSC tuners only handle "over the air" signals and not digital cable. What's the problem here? Almost all new TV's can handle digital cable directly, why not these Media Center tuners?

[Chris @ Feb 22nd 2007 4:28AM]

Because your HDTV has a QAM tuner. Most PC HDTV tuner cards do not feature this and if they do the support is limited, that is it only works with the card's software and not MCE 2005 or Vista MC.

You are also lucky as many cable providers scramble all of their non-local HDTV channels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAM_tuner

[Uncle Fester @ Feb 22nd 2007 4:50AM]

It's probably designed for us poor unfortunates Down Under that do not have cable.
I would like to get my hands on it for a bit of a play.
http://www.av1.co.nz

[anonymous @ Feb 22nd 2007 9:50AM]

are those cup holders?? that's more like it for a media center!