HTPC fans were devastated when it was revealed that
only OEM PC builders would have the privilege of building
Vista Media Center PCs with CableCARD support, but hope is here: it looks like a few members of The Green Button forum have figured out how to build their own CableCARD ready HTPC. There's two barriers to overcome, which unfortunately still make it more difficult than just
picking up an internal or external ATI Digital Cable Tuner, but they're not terrible: would-be system builders just need to score an OCUR tuner product ID number and use a BIOS contains the correct OSFR table. No one's figured out how to tweak just any BIOS yet, but apparently most ASUS P5Q motherboards work fine -- so really you just need to score some used CableCARD tuners off eBay and ask the seller for the PID from their computer. Or you could throw caution to the wind and plug in the generic PID of 263DJ-2Y9YT-6X9G6-W28DB-697TF, which may or may not work. Anyone feeling brave enough to grab a new mobo and CableCARD tuner and give this a shot?
posted Apr 29th 2009 4:28PM
When there's a will, there's a way.
Props to the modders.
Dammit, I thought engadget was secretly throwing away an Xbox LIVE Code for some free content in this article :).
I'm lost on the whole TV Tuner/CableCard situation, so, what should I buy to have a full/interactive guide like my settop box, except on my pc?
+20
Also, gimme. I hate this stupid "HD-PVR" you HAVE to buy (in Canada from Shaw cable for $400USD) - especially considering that I used to use my PC as a PVR until I decided to try out HD cable.
Now to convince all of the idiotic cable companies to use cablecard (yeah... shaw cable doesn't and neither do any of the other godawful cable companies in Canada)
I think I just found my new XP Key...
Just use newsgroups/torrents, that is better then the cablecard hacks that this is trying to do. cablecard sucks because there are copyright restrictions.
"First" people suck!
Last time I checked, you can't watch live television through the use of torrents. Your comment is pointless.
First off, Cablecard tuners have copywrite restrictions because that is the law. You may record a show, but not distribute it. So while your torrents may be freely available, you are breaking the law by seeding them and downloading them. So it's not that the torrents don't have copywrite laws, it's just that the machine isn't enforcing those laws. We are suppose to enforce them ourselves - but I guess you don't think the law applies to your situation.
Or you could, ya know, watch Hulu.
Hulu isn't HD. If you wanted to watch SD, you could just use any old cheap video card.
Or you could record any show you want and play/pause it in full 1080i resolution with this method on a box you built yourself.
Or... you could go do something... productive? Seriously, the amount of effort people put into their entertainment systems, if applied to learning a craft or trade, would lead to far more good times than watching any show on cable TV ever did.
I get paid pretty well to know a lot about computers. Stuff like this is EXACTLY why I get interested in computers, and therefore know a lot about them.
So this is both a craft and trade. Kind of like a house contractor who builds birdhouses on the weekends. Building the birdhouses enhances his skills, even though his day job involves building something else.
And really, who the hell are you to tell people what to do with their time?
enGADGET! where we care about gadgets, so you clearly don't belong here if you can't see why we put effort into our gadgets.
Kamokazi makes a good point actually. I suppose if building something like this is a fair challenge for someone then they're not wasting their time doing it. I built plenty of stuff like this myself. The only thing that bums me out is when people keep doing stuff like this long after it has ceased being any kind of challenge for them. Nothing wrong at all with tinkering with stuff or watching TV but I've seen a lot of people, myself once included and hopefully not again, that stop progressing and just do things that are fun but not challenging. Apologize for the way I brought it up. Prolly more about my problems than anyones here.
Well I think maybe you just misunderstood a bit is all. Building the rig is trivial, no one denies that. Getting the CableCARD tuner to work on a non-OEM mobo was the trick. It took some people with some serious firmware diving skills (which often involves hex editing, assembly coding, etc.) to figure out how to make them play nice for the rest of us (I consider myself to be a hardware guru, and I know these guys are WAAAY beyond me.) And even with the instructions it's still not going to be easy for someone to do...there will a LOT of trial and error with hardware IDs to figure out what will work and what won't.
It's rare to see someone online willing to backpedal on their position, and shows real character...I'd like to apologize for my snappier statement at the end of my last post.
@ franktinsley.... i dont think you thought your comment through BEFORE you typed it.... my business IS htpcs!!!!! my livelihood is directly tied to home theater pcs... so.. uh were you telling me and other HTPC business owners to quit my business and go do something else?? or were you tallking to all the hobbyists that gravitate towards this post and telling them to switch to model making???? if you dont like this stuff, WHY are you reading the article... and WHY are you wasting your time posting a comment!?!? not well thought through AT ALL!!
to everyone else, i agree that MS built a beautiful interface and then had its legs cut out from under it with serious incompatibility issues with both digital cable AND satellite services.. the business model we've moved to at our firm is to tout IPTV alternatives like hulu and netflix.. our focus is actually timely in that in this time of saving your pennies, netflix is cheap and hulu is free, compared to subscription tv.. but one of a couple problems is, say HD sports... that's a killer for me.. and alot of people... but my setup at home is a gyration remote, a dock bar with hulu, netflix, abc, etc... and a tiny wireless thumb board... i ditched digital cable and kept basic... (gotta have my foxsports midwest for the cardinal games)..
BUT.. if this "hack" was easy to bring to market, i would have no worries with customers who dont want to ditch digital and HD cable...
stupid cable labs..
Fuck CableLabs.
That is all...
I agree. Microsoft created an amazing product with Vista Media Center, and CableLabs crippled it. I love my VMC setup, but not being able to get any of my high def channels is just retarted. It's the one thing keeping Windows Media Center PC's from really taking off.
CableLabs should die.
Retarted? I hope that was intentional.
Well, I can get HD off the air and it looks great. I don't watch enough tv to justify paying for some digital hd package but I am all for anything that lets people use their media centers properly. Windows Media Center is the unsung hero of Windows features but mot a lot of people use it because it won't work with their fancy cable/sat packages. I just use OTA HD and analog cable so it works fine for me. Between that and the frontend it provides for local media and netflix on demand, WMC is easily my favorite thing about Vista and 7.
Last time I checked, tv shows are released on newsgroups/torrents within an hour. As well I live in Central Time zone therefore the show comes on the newsgroups directly after the live airing. I use NZBplayer which streams the newsgroup file within a minute. Need sports, most sports are on antenna tv.
yo be quiet, don't tell these newbs
So what you are saying is nobody needs tuners in their computer because you can download from torrents. But if no one has tuners in their computer, then how can TV get seeded to torrents?
Don't try to think about it too hard, don't want that hamster in your head to get too tired.
@Nohone, LOL
Also, last I checked you can't program your PC to randomly download shows it thinks you might like based on your previous viewing habits and other viewers like you, unless you are using Nero Liquid TV powered by TiVo, which would need a cable tuner. :)
Last I checked there are sports programs on TV that don't necessarily show at all and even if they do, I don't want to watch them an hour late.
Is it at all possible you torrent guys could STFU and stop trying to tell everyone else they should watch TV your way?
Steven, which groups are the best to pull from after they have aired?
Dude i agree. usenet is soooooooo fast. and with astraweb for $11 a month it beats a cable subscription. Nzb streamer is great. i think they have a VMC plugin to stream nzb's now too.
Oh yeah, and the whole, "shhhhhh" thing about usenet is dumb. I never would've figured it out if people just shushed up about it!
interesting.... it was to my understanding that this can already be done with an hd cable card and MythTV... which is even integrated into XBMC now, which my HTPC is running through ubuntu....
That MythTV/CableCard page is an April Fools joke. So no, cable card will not work with MythTV.
The link is updated now to say it, but even on 4/1/09, it popped up a pink unicorn if you clicked on the download link at the bottom...
You might be able to get clear QAM channels like you will be able to do in Windows 7 Media center (or Vista MC with an HDHomeRun via a kind of driver hack), but those channels are quite limited and mainly consist of the locals you could grab in better quality over the air via antenna.
P5Q isn't an Intel chipset, it's an Asus model name...
Nice catch, thanks for the correction.
This does not mean anything unless they can get a cable company to activate the cable card attached to this box.
When they work properly, a Hauppauge HD-PVR is better. No DRM, no hacking, and works with any provider.
Engadget, you are going to get yelled at I bet. Like when everyone posted the Blu-Ray code or whatever it was back in the day.
I think that was hd dvd.
Blu ray is WAY tighter from what I've played with.
You just invalidated the generic pid by publishing it. Shame engadget
well, there goes being able to find a DCT w/PID on ebay.
TV...mostly sucks.
What, they locked CableCard to specific ID numbers in the BIOS? That's just pathetic, and has accomplished zilch in stopping piracy. Much like BBC HD and their freesat DRM scheme for free-to-air broadcasts.
I'm waiting to see if Microsoft finds a way to plug this hole before spending a bunch of money on a new HTPC.
Uhh...why would Microsoft try to "plug this hole"? They built the Media Center into Windows as a great feature but content providers who are scared of people ripping HD programming made it damn near impossible to use your HTPC as a replacement for your set-top-box. Microsoft would like nothing better than to replace all those STBs but they have been hamstrung by CableLabs.
Awesome. CableCard equipped pc's are just too expensive.
I honestly have very little patience for cable at this point anyway. This should have happened years ago with support from the cable companies.
Still, congratulations to the modders. It is good to see.
I hope they get this working universally
I still dont understand why only OEM's can have CableCARD support. How does that benefit Microsoft or ATi? Or is it more a concern to the cable companies and big Hollywood?
It doesn't benefit either of them. They didn't create the restriction.
Why care about CableLabs? I am praying for DirecTV to revive its PCI-E receiver card, which was supposed to be supported by Windows 7 until they put it on hold. Satellite TV PWNS cable TV.
The reason CableCard is so complicated is that enterteiment industry together with cable operators wants to control everything and in (their) ideal world you have to pay everytime you watch/download their show in another format.
I can watch free to air HD cable TV but they are most test feeds. Most interestings are crypted and this is where CableCard comes in. Now in order to control who installed those PCs and what serial number put video on torrent they made it this way.
So,Its all about control. technology is here and works great.
In my city we are preparing an ungry letter against local cable company for their monopol.
What about you?
Me? Nah, no point, I stopped watching regular TV a good few years ago. I use uTorrent and FeedMyTorrents to watch the few shows I care about.
You can already do this now with FTA "Free to Air Dish" and PCI or USB FTA tuner card "DVB-S" but your limited to channelson the FTA Satellites.
finally
I built a few HTPC's for my house. I was going to get an HD TV tuner for digital HD cable. Then I found out what a pain it was. My solution was to cancel cable and stop watching those shows. Mission accomplished, media industry.
ha haha! i already have a p5q motherboard! im halfway there!
I like this. The biggest obstacle for home entertainment integration is that dang, clunky, inefficient freakin' set top box.
Good news is almost all new Asus mobos have the OCUR table available already.
I understand CableLabs and the content providing entities wanting to protect their product from being abused, however, many of us are paying for the content, and the reason we want an HTPC is consolidation of our media center. We would rather have 1 PC running all the content rather than 1 box for DVDs, 1 Box for digital distribution, 1box for cable/VoD, 1 box for music, etc.... And making us buy that solution from OEM's is manhandling the free market and dances on the edge of antitrust.
I shouldn't be thought of as a criminal for wanting to provide my own hardware solution to a service I'm already paying for.
It's nice to see Green Button making things complicated for them, but honestly this is not a solution that can satisfy the main problem. The contrived (and probably illegal) nature of this workaround makes it unpalletable for the average HTPC enthusiast who fits the profile of what I described above. I'm not going to bellyache about it any more than I already have, I'm just going to continue to watch basic cable until a time comes that online/streaming media swallows the cable companies whole.
.... with OSFRLoader2 and this key..... CHAMPION! all works perfectly!