It has been a year since I wrote the first part of this series, when I first purchased my new townhouse. I had a daunting task ahead of me, and I was more ambitious than most, but I’m happy to say I’ve completed (a year later) everything that I set out to do. In part one of my install, I decided where I would mount my display, speakers, and AV rack to fully optimize the limited space, as well as how I would run all the cable necessary to future proof the install and meet my cosmetic goals. In this post, I’ll describe the challenge of getting it all done, and show you the result.

Running the cable

To run the audio, video, and network cable, I had to do a lot of drilling and pulling. In order to get my hand (and remodel drill bit) into the wall, a lot of 4 inch holes had to be drilled; then afterwards patched. My new year project is to paint and install new trim. All cables terminate behind my AV rack where they are either punched down into a patch panel (network and speaker cables), or directly attached to individual components such as the AV Receiver (AVR). It was important to me to use exact-length cables behind the rack because I have very limited space for wire clutter, and as you’ll see later, the rack has to be free to slide in-and-out on rails for maintenance. Another important factor for minimal wire clutter behind the rack is optimizing air flow to keep components cool.

View Full Album

Modifying the built-in cabinet for the AV rack

As I described in my first post, the built-in bookshelf in the console separating my living and dining space was not wide enough for standard AV components, so after some precise measuring and discussions with my brother-in-law Nick who knows how to do pretty much anything related to home improvement (my lifeline), my plan was to do some cutting and install a built-in AV rack. This specific challenge is what I procrastinated on for a year before finally getting around to starting. What a mess! With the help of Nick, the bookshelf was cut out; studs in the console were removed to widen the opening; tiles around the fireplace were replaced; a new sub-floor was installed for mounting the rack; new paneling was installed within the new opening; and finally, new trim was installed around the opening. Nick and I completed this violence to my console, and mounted the rack, in a single day.

View Full Album

AV rack installation, power, and cooling

I ordered rack-mount shelves with custom faceplates for each of my components, as well as a drawer (for remotes, etc.), blank faceplates, and network patch panel, from StayOnline.com, who always satisfied my order within a week; I definitely recommend them. To keep the rack from sliding out on its rails, a screw-on plate at the very bottom is used, which also serves to aesthetically cover the levers that enable it to slide out and rotate 90 degrees for servicing.

All components installed in the rack are powered through a Panamax power conditioner, including the plasma display mounted on the adjacent wall. A nice thing about the Panamax is it provides a real-time voltmeter on the front. Each shelf and custom faceplate has an added benefit of enforcing airspace above and below each component to improve airflow. Because only two main components will be on at the same time, i.e. the AVR and one of: Xbox 360, DVD player, or BlueRay player, my hope is that natural convection will be sufficient for cooling. On the front of the rack, I installed a 1U perforated steel blank panel at the very bottom, and cut a hole aesthetically covered with a floor vent in the back/very top. If all goes as expected, cool air will be sucked in the front and exhausted out the back. If it turns out natural convection doesn’t get the job done, I’ll install another perforated filler panel in the middle of the rack (probably above the Xbox) and a low-noise fan to force air out the back. Suggestions are welcome.

View Full Album

Before and After

Completed Project

As you can see from the above photos, the project turned out exactly as I had envisioned when writing my first post – no visible wires and no sacrifice of floor space. All speakers in my 5.1 setup are Paradigm. The center channel is mounted within the sacrificed window frame above the display, and the front left and right speakers are on stands on either side of the display connected to terminals in the wall. The surround left and right dipole speakers are mounted on the rear wall (picture below) behind the couch, and the sub is in the front-left corner of the room.

Windows Media Center is at the core of my media collection, which tops 2TB currently. My digital media library contains over 4500 music tracks, 300 DVDs, 2000 photos, and a plethora of recorded HD and SD tv. The entire media library is available to each room (living room, master bedroom, and guest bedroom) by way of an Extender for Windows Media Center and a multi-zone Sonos audio system (a wireless Sonos controller is shown below). I’ll cover more details about my Media Center, Extenders, and media storage in another post.

What’s next?

Paint, molding, and better control. In the next few months, I’ll be installing trim around all my windows, crown molding, and painting all the walls (it’s a new house, so the walls are boring). I’ll also be purchasing a better universal remote (touch panel) and installing an IR-repeater system in the rack so I can build a door to cover the rack cabinet for an even more minimalistic install.

I recently purchased a new home, and anyone serious about home audio/video (like me) knows that moving is an opportunity to "do it right this time." The home is new construction, but unfortunately the builder didn’t do obvious things like run CAT5, so I’ll be doing a bit of "remodeling" with the help of my brother-in-law (who’s a great electrician) to do a clean installation. I thought I’d share the process with everyone, including pictures, in case it is of any help. I’ll start this series with what my goals are, and my new purchases to get the job done.

My primary goals are to: conceal all wiring and make the installation look as minimalistic as possible (while also future proofing), preserve as much floor space as possible, and ensure the entire entertainment/lighting experience can be easily controlled. Because of these goals, I’ve decided to sacrifice one of three (the middle one) small windows on the only wall a TV could possibly be mounted. Using a piece of AV furniture would have been way easier, but remember, my goal is to maximize floor space. There is a lot of light from other windows in the room, so I’m not really loosing anything if the install turns out the way I plan.

Seriously, this place was not designed for a media enthusiast. As fate would also have it, the built-in shelving system next to the fire place, where I had planned to place my equipment, is not wide enough for AV components. I could put an AV rack in my garage below the living room, but running up-and-down the stairs in the event I want to watch a DVD would be a pretty bad experience. I’m up for the challenge, so decided to cut out the shelves and custom install a Middle Atlantic swiveling AV rack. This will definitely require some custom work to keep with my goal of looking minimalistic.

Lastly, I’ll have to mount my surround left and right speakers (dipole drivers) on the back wall because I’d prefer to not hang the right one from a roof mount to keep decent symmetry. As you can see from the above picture, the main floor is very open and I feel having a roof-mounted surround over the main walk-way would not be aesthetically pleasing. The rear wall is about 4 feet behind the main listening position, so I’m not worried about this placement.

Here’s my order from Blue Jeans Cable:

• (2) 25-foot HDMI Series-1 Belden Bonded-Pair
• (2) 25-foot 1694A component video
• (1) 30-foot LC-1 subwoofer cable
• (1) 35-foot 1694A RF (coax) cable
• (3) 3-foot 1505A RF (coax) cable
• (2) 3-foot 1694A (coax) digital audio cable
• (2) 3-foot optical digital audio cable
• (1) 250-foot spool Belden 12AWG 5000UE speaker cable
• (1) 25-foot wire for IR blaster in rack (1/8" jack)

Gulp! My next post will show how I run the wires and how I’ll mount the TV. Following posts will show the finished product with tidy wiring job. I’ll show off my Vista Media Center too.

Advice is always welcome (but you’d better speak up now because I have a lot of work to do and I’m moving in 4 days!)

On May 15th, an HD-DVD player update became available for the Xbox 360 accessory. Unlike Xbox 360 software updates which automatically download and prompt for installation, you’ll only get a prompt for the HD-DVD player update when you try to play any HD-DVD. This was confusing to me, as I knew of the update, but didn’t know why the console hadn’t automatically downloaded it. After I popped in an HD-DVD, I was asked to install the update.

A reason I was excited about this update was because of important sound fixes and updates. For starters, Dolby Digital (DD) surround always sounded rather lackluster compared to my other DVD player. It turns out that there has been a bug which caused HD-DVD DD output to be stuck in “night mode”, which is essentially dynamic range compression. So, rather than full dynamic range transferred at 640Kbps, the bitrate (and sound quality) was lower. Thankfully, this update fixes the problem and enables the full 640Kbps bitrate by default, and provides an option to enable dynamic range compression (night mode).

My favorite feature of this update; however, is the ability to output all HD-DVD audio in DTS 5.1 at 1.5Mbps. Enabling this was also a bit counter-intuitive to me at first, but makes sense in the end. I thought navigating to the System tab from the Xbox 360 dashboard would allow me to set DTS from within the audio settings. Nope. It does make sense that the option is not here because these audio settings are for the main console, and the DTS feature is specifically for HD-DVD movies.

To enable DTS output, insert an HD-DVD movie, and from an XBox remote (like the one that came with the premium console package, or the HD-DVD player), press the ‘Display’ button. 

You will then see menu options specific to the HD-DVD player:

Choose the ‘Digital audio settings’ menu option to specify the audio output format from the HD-DVD player regardless of what audio format is on the disk.

You only have to set this once, i.e. it is a setting for the HD-DVD player, not any particular movie. Because of this, I would be a fan of moving the HD-DVD player settings into the system blade. Finding this feature was sort of like an Easter egg hunt. Once set, all HD-DVD movies will output audio in the DTS 5.1 format at 1.5Mbps bitrate. I can definitely hear the difference. While Dolby Digital is louder at lower volume levels on my system, DTS is more crisp.

I’d like to see DTS support for regular DVDs and for Xbox Live Video Marketplace. I wonder why this feature is specific to HD-DVDs? Anyone know?

Microsoft shipped first-party (it’s own) MPEG-2 and Dolby Digital decoders in Windows Vista to support DVD, live/recorded TV, and HDV (home video editing) scenarios. These decoders are included by default for the Ultimate and Home Premium editions; however, large OEMs have the option to pre-install the Microsoft decoders for Business, Home Basic, and Starter editions (primarily for DVD playback support). Mileage may vary depending on the OEM (I don’t know which OEMs choose to do this).

Why would Microsoft do this? To ensure a quality and consistent user experience of built-in applications like Media Player, Media Center, Movie Maker, and DVD Maker. Each of these applications leverages MPEG-2 in some way and it would have cost Microsoft significantly to license a third-party decoder per copy of Windows, and they wouldn’t be able to innovate or handle quality control. Further, Dolby Digital has an explicit per-application licensing policy, so in addition to quality control concerns, it would be a challenge (if at all possible) licensing a third-party solution that met legal requirements for each internal application that required its use.

Dolby licensing policy requires that Dolby Digital implementations not be sharable. Only a vendor’s specific software player can legally decode Dolby Digital from their specific decoder;  i.e. vendor-A’s software player cannot use vendor-B’s decoder.

Lastly (and importantly), Microsoft had to implement their own MPEG-2 decoder to ensure an end-to-end protected media path for enabling Windows as a platform for premium content such as digital HD cable (OCUR), HD-DVD, and BlueRay (with premium satellite solutions to hopefully come in the future). Specifically, it was necessary to ensure certain precautions were taken at encoder input and output such that the decrypted stream couldn’t be compromised during the component transition, and that decryption keys are protected.

Speaking of a protected media path, new to Windows Vista is the Enhanced Video Renderer (EVR), which provides many enhancements over video rendering platforms prior to Vista, in addition to support for Protected Video Path - Output Protection Manager (PVP-OPM) and Protected Video Path - User Accessible Bus (PVP-UAB). A couple noteworthy are support for DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA), and resilience to glitches (see Multimedia Class Scheduling section in my post about Vista Kernel Improvements). While the MS MPEG-2 decoder supports other (pre-Vista) renderers for output of the decoded stream, only EVR supports the protected media path (and the many other enhancements). If you’re the geek type, and want intricate details, check out the EVR WinHec presentation. Also, recognize that EVR is for rendering on display attached to the Windows Vista PC, not when streaming content across a network for rendering within a Media Center Extender for display on a TV. While the PC-network-TV end-to-end “path” is also fully protected, EVR is not a component used in this scenario.

For all of the aforementioned reasons, Media Center in Windows Vista will not allow use of third-party MPEG-2 or Dolby Digital decoders like prior editions did. However, while Media Player uses MS decoders by default, it is possible to register third-party decoders for decoding within that application.

Media Center will use 3rd party video and audio decoders for anything other than MPEG-2 and Dolby Digital respectively; it will only ignore any registered 3rd party MPEG-2 and Dolby Digital decoders. Unlike Media Center, Media Player will not ignore 3rd party MPEG-2 decoders (even though it uses the Microsoft version by default). Media Player will; however, ignore 3rd party Dolby Digital decoders and only use the Microsoft version.

I’ll write follow-up posts to discuss why the MS MPEG-2 decoder may have some short-term challenges, and ultimately why it (combined with the new video pipeline) will yield the best possible results.

Any questions or comments?

Consider a TiVo or other personal video recorder (PVR) attached to your TV. If something should happen tragically to one of these devices, such as system or hard drive failure, it’s certain that any recorded content on the device will be lost (once you finally get it back from repair). From a broadcaster’s perspective, the content on such devices is transitory and not permanent (even though many people tend to keep recordings around for a long time). This is especially true for protected content, where a protection scheme (DRM) is used to lock the content to that specific device or limited other devices within a home network. For these dedicated consumer electronic (CE) devices, users tend to expect loss of their recordings should some evil befall the unit.

Now consider a Vista PC with digital cable tuner (generically referred to as OCUR). Just like a PVR, content recorded and stored on the PC hard drive is considered transient by broadcasters. Unlike stand-alone PVRs though, a PC is much more susceptible to system failures (although hopefully this is much improved with Vista) because of buggy software, viruses, etc. where end users might re-install the OS to recover from a poor state, or even worse have to replace a major component like the motherboard. Just like a PVR, if a Vista PC enters such a tragic state, all recorded content will be lost.

Some specifics are in order:

• If your content is on a hard drive that crashes, you can’t do anything about that anyway. Your recordings are gone. This isn’t an area where I expect users would be surprised to have data loss.
• If you re-install the OS, even though your recorded content is on another drive or partition, your recordings will be worthless
• If you replace your motherboard (of course with one from your OEM that supports OCUR), even though nothing else about the system has changed, your recordings will be worthless.
• Replacing the processor, hard drive, RAM, or other system components will not impact your recorded content.

The reason your recordings will be worthless is because the process used to protect the OCUR-recorded content is based in-part on the system security identifier (SID) and is also tied to the OCUR capable motherboard BIOS. Hence, if you re-install the OS, the system SID changes and all bets are off. Likewise, if you change the motherboard, the BIOS also changes, so all bets are off.

I personally do not know all the detailed CableLabs legal requirements for a certified Vista PC, but not being able to recover a DRM key in a limited secure way is a problem for PC users. Heck, Vista has a built-in backup program that users likely expect can recover their recorded TV, but doesn’t (make note: your recorded TV files *will not* be backed up by the Vista backup application). Take for example the BitLocker feature which makes use of a secure Trusted Platform Module (TPM) built on to certain motherboards to encrypt the entire OS file system. This solution enables users to backup the necessary keys to Microsoft’s online Digital Locker for recovery. A similar solution for DRM keys seems within the realm of possibility (but again, I am not sure of all the intricate legal details). While Vista provides a parity experience to a TiVo in a system failure situation, as I’ve said before, I believe Microsoft has a responsibility to ensure these scenarios make sense for PC users and not just accept how things currently work in existing consumer electronics offerings. I suspect, though, that folks within eHome are thinking about this for improving the experience over time. I hope so anyway.

What do you think?

I’ve seen a couple sound cards on the market that incorporate two sound processors, one for decoding a premium digital audio bitstream (Dolby Digital for example) and handling the digital-to-analog (D/A) conversion, and another for encoding the analog output of the first processor into various formats like MP3 or WMA. In effect, these cards rip the track by using the analog loophole of content protection schemes, whereby the then non-protected premium audio is directly routed (looped) into an encoder for output into another format. This is generally referred to as transcoding, but the analog piece is the “clever” addition.

This got me thinking about my Demystifying Audio Options for DVD and HD-DVD post and the new lossless 24bit/96kHz per-channel audio formats (this also applies to DVD-Audio and SACD). Because high-quality components are used in these new class of sound cards, and there is no “wire” between the two sound processors, the loss by doing a D/A conversion (then back to digital) would be minimal. Certainly the resultant sound would be better than CD quality. The only interesting thing which I’m not sure any of these solutions provide, is maintaining channel separation (surround sound rather than simple 2-channel). WMA for example supports up to 7.1 channels, and Microsoft provides freely available tools (and APIs) for combining multiple discrete channel PCM files into a single multi-channel WMA file. Assuming there are no legal restrictions I am not aware of, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to produce a solution which:

• Removes DRM for discrete multi-channel audio output
• Decodes lossless audio bitstream into multi-channel PCM
• (via analog loopback) Encodes multi-channel PCM into multi-channel WMA

While it may be possible to do something like this using the analog loophole to get better-than-CD quality sound, at minimum, licensing of the premium audio codec (decoder) would be necessary. If everything was to be done in hardware on the card, the WMA (if WMA was the format of choice) encoder would also have to be licensed.

The value for all of this? DRM-free high-quality sound. I do what to share a couple important thoughts though:

First, content owners have the option of specifying in the digitally encoded bitstream that a copy-protected output is required, i.e. no analog output. This is common for video, but I’m not certain whether this also applies to premium audio. Speak up if you know. If such a flag exists now or in the future, if this new class of card ignored it, that would be illegal. Second, if licensing of the decoders/encoders is happening already to make this solution work (legally), why not just skip the analog hole, which will likely be plugged in the future anyway, and do a complete digital transcode? Heck, I’m betting the majority of folks (who are high-end audiophiles anyway) would also settle to have Windows Media DRM (WMDRM) applied to the resultant file to get access to a lossless multi-channel WMA file that they can play back from any Plays-For-Sure device (that understands the WMA lossless codec) or Media Center Extender connected to a surround sound system.

Am I off my rocker or missing something important? Something like this could really make DVD-Audio or SACD relevant again (or maybe just online music marketplaces could sell these multi-channel tracks for a premium). There is a precedent for this already in the HD-DVD specification, it’s called managed copy.

Previous in series

Lossy vs. Lossless

Throughout this post, I use the terms lossy and lossless, where the former means the sound is not the exact original (has loss), and the latter means the sound is the exact original (has no loss). By way of example, a lossy sound format is MP3 and a lossless format is WAV (otherwise referred to as PCM or Pulse Code Modulation as this is the most common use for WAV).

HD-DVD sound parity with DVD

Both DVD and HD-DVD support the lossy Dolby Digital (DD) and DTS surround formats which have a max bitstream of 1.5Mbps. There are four interconnects with enough bandwidth to output this lossy surround signal from your source player to an audio/video receiver (AVR):

• Discrete analog outputs
• Digital Optical (S/PDIF)
• Digital Coax
• HDMI (which will also carry video)

If the discrete analog outputs are used, the digital-to-analog (D/A) conversion happens in the source player rather than the AVR. For all digital outputs (including HDMI), the maximum 1.5Mbps bitstream is simply sent over the digital interconnect to the AVR for D/A conversion.

The only time sound quality would be better using the discrete analog outputs of your source player would be if the analog pre-amp and D/A converters in the source player were better then in the AVR. This is generally not true except for the higher end players (or you have a poor quality receiver).

High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI)

HDMI is a single cable high-bandwidth solution for transporting both audio and video. There are three versions: 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3, with 1.1 or 1.2 being in almost every piece of recent consumer electronics equipment today. 1.3 is brand new and adds some new value, but to be explicitly clear:

YOU DO NOT NEED HDMI v1.3 TO EXPERIENCE THE NEW HD AUDIO FORMATS. Both versions 1.1 and 1.2 support the bandwidth necessary for 7.1 channels of 24bit/96kHz audio (discrete analog outputs is also an option if HDMI is not). For the eager minds, 24bit/96kHz is better than big budget Hollywood films which master at 24bit/48kHz, and ordinary films which typically master at 16bit/48kHz.

Speculation as to why pre-HDMI digital interconnects weren’t revisioned

I’m fairly certain digital optical (S/PDIF) and digital coax were not revisioned to support the higher bandwidth needed for the new lossless formats because a single cable for carrying audio and video is a preferred setup experience. HDMI had this promise already, and also supported a copy protection scheme supported by content owners. While it may have been possible to revision existing digital interconnect to meet bandwidth and copy protection needs, receivers would also have to be updated (hopefully just a firmware update), and consumers would still be forced to connect two separate wires and deal with potential synchronization issues between audio and video. In the end, the value of HDMI far exceeded the cost of not sticking with existing interconnect. If a reader has more background on this, I’d love to hear it.

HD-DVD sound advancements beyond DVD

Unlike DVD, HD-DVD also supports two new compressed lossless surround sound formats: Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. As a side note, typically the compression schemes used that can still achieve lossless reproduction are a 2:1 ratio (compressed to half the original size). Additionally, uncompressed lossless multi-channel PCM is supported. As fate would have it, there are also two new lossy formats with improvements over Dolby Digital and DTS: Dolby Digital Plus (DD+) and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio.

All HD-DVD players are required to support every Dolby format; with the two new DTS HD formats as optional.

Additionally, all HD-DVD players are required to decode all audio formats (including the legacy ones) in the source player into multi-channel uncompressed PCM (so it can be mixed with picture-in-picture and menu sound effects), which is far to big to fit over digital optical or digital coax (in reality, the physical cable has the bandwidth, but the standards which govern how the bits are sent over the interconnect do not support the necessary throughput). The uncompressed lossless multi-channel PCM format can; however, be sent over HDMI (any version) or have the D/A conversion happen in the source player and output over the discrete analog outputs.

So, if any of the new lossy or lossless audio formats are used by the HD-DVD source content (what’s on the disk), and a digital optical or coax interconnect is used, the resultant multi-channel uncompressed PCM is automatically re-encoded on-the-fly by the source player (to Dolby Digital or DTS) to fit over that interconnect. In effect, the value of lossless sound is lost and DVD sound parity is the result. Importantly though, you’ll still get great sound, even if it isn’t as great as it could be.

The only way to achieve full fidelity lossless reproduction of the new lossless HD sound formats (or any of the new lossy HD formats) is to use the discrete analog outputs, or HDMI (remember, you don’t need v1.3).

What’s the confusion around HDMI 1.3?

Simple: the HDMI website clearly says that v1.3 is required for the new HD lossless formats. This is true only in the sense that v1.3 allows for the raw Dolby Digital TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio bitstreams, as opposed to the uncompressed multi-channel PCM bitstreams, to be sent over the interconnect. This is extremely misleading. Note that sending the raw bitstream would also require the AVR to support the corresponding decoders, but would have the additional value of enabling product differentiation by higher-end digital components and processing of the streams. At the end of the day; however, whether the bitstream is the raw compressed lossless format, or the uncompressed multi-channel PCM format, the audio transfer is lossless (bit for bit the same audio). Importantly, you don’t have to upgrade your AVR or use HDMI v1.3 interconnect to get HD sound. You could in the future upgrade your AVR and have HDMI v1.3 interconnect for potential improvements by way of processing enhancements, but there is no reason to wait.

Conclusion

• If your AVR has HDMI inputs (and processes the sound rather than simply providing interconnect switching) and your HD-DVD player has HDMI output, you can get benefit of all new formats.
• If your AVR has discrete analog inputs (most do) and your HD-DVD player has discrete analog outputs, you can get benefit of all new HD audio formats.
• If you don’t have, or can’t use, HDMI or discrete analog interconnect, you’ll get DVD parity sound (the HD-DVD player will trans-code on-the-fly automatically).
• Your AVR does not have to understand any of the new required HD audio codecs (remember, the receiver sees a linear PCM bitstream).

Let me know if you have any questions or want me to expand more on the topic.

P.S. Thanks to all the bright folks at Microsoft who helped me understand all this voodoo.

Next in series

The editor of Linux Today wrote a fabulous article about The Next Hurdle for Desktop Linux being HD. I highly encourage you to first read my post about The Real Deal on Vista’s HD Restrictions to better understand the requirements, then the above article. In short, the key points of this article are:

• The Feb 19, 2009 US deadline for moving from analog to digital broadcasts is quickly approaching, creating a vehicle for the nascent HD content market
• PC users also want access to HD content (or be a hub for whole-home distribution)
• Video card manufacturers are signing-on to support industry *required* DRM schemes to enable premium HD content on the PC platform
• Lack of revenue from Linux users doesn’t provide incentive for video card manufacturers to author native Linux drivers
• Without DRM, content providers require down-res of content (from HD to SD)
• Software in-between the video card driver and display must also support protecting the HD content, and hacks to bypass content-owner restrictions are illegal
• GPLv3 places restrictions on DRM use, which may inhibit end-to-end solutions

The Linux Today editor who authored the article says it best:

Looking at the future of digital content, will the GPLv3 forever keep Linux relegated to servers and older machines that don’t have HD video requirements?

I am confident the open source community will step up to this challenge, hopefully in a legal manner, but it will be interesting to see what the impact to GPL will be.

What do you think?

Previous in series

Quite simply, those of us who have built our own MediaCenter PC are out of luck when it comes to CableCARD; at least for the near future anyway (I’ll get to this later). Vista has shipped, but there are no OEMs offering CableCARD support for their MediaCenter offerings yet. This is mostly due to the heavy weight CableLabs certification process (which I won’t get into in detail). So what are your options for getting CableCARD for premium digital cable (including HD) in the near future?

(1) Purchase a Vista MediaCenter PC today from an OEM who promises you an upgrade path (make sure it’s in writing too). Note that I’m not aware of any OEMs who have explicitly said they provide an upgrade path for customers who have purchased a Vista-Capable logo’d PC. In all honesty, while it may be possible for an OEM to get CableLabs certification for a particular MediaCenter PC model that was shipped prior to general Vista availability, i.e. with a Vista-Capable logo, I’m not sure whether this will happen or not. My feeling is that if the option is feasible, only the most customer caring OEMs will do so due to the significant cost of certification (note that this certification cost is per unique system). If such a loving OEM does exist, the process would have to be one of the following:

• Purchase a Digital CableCARD Tuner from them when they become available, and download the necessary system updates that enable the digital tuner to work. Of course, you would have had to install the Vista upgrade first.
• Send your MediaCenter PC back to the manufacturer for all necessary upgrades.

The second option seems the most feasible considering that OEMs likely don’t want the system updates getting distributed illegally (not that I’m sure option-2 would thwart such a thing anyway). This option does have considerable cost though, both monetary for shipping the PC, and in terms of customer loyalty because they’ll be without a PC for some time. This option will likely only happen for an OEM that has sold a lot of these MediaCenter PCs and are willing to cover the costs to slightly ease customer pain. My intuition is that I doubt either will happen, but we’ll see if an OEM steps up to do the right thing. 

(2) The other option is to wait for OEMs to start shipping their CableCARD ready machines. This will probably be in full swing within the next few months. Obviously, this option has less unknowns and is the safer bet.

Let me know what you think about all this, and considering the restrictions, what OEMs could do to make you feel better about whatever decision they make. Also, if you have any thoughts other than “there shouldn’t be any restrictions”, I’d like to hear them.

Previous in series Next in series

iTheater is an open source alternative to Apple’s FrontRow application. iTheater, like FrontRow, limits your multimedia experience to the Mac (unless your Mac is connected to a television), and is essentially a 10 foot experience of iTunes and Quicktime. The user interface is similar to the upcoming Apple TV, which is specifically designed to extend the iTunes experience to TVs around the house via wired or wireless networks. None of these solutions currently support live or recorded TV; only content stored in iTunes.

It’s great to see these applications becoming more wide spread.

Looking forward, it would be great if the open source developer community exposed iTheater and the iTunes library it consumes via standards-based protocols, i.e. those defined by the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) such that the application could not only be used to browse and play media libraries on other media servers (like Windows Media Player), but it could act as a media server for other standards-based media players. Doing this would certainly give iTheater an advantage over Apple’s FrontRow.