By William Van Winkle		  
 
FOR THE LAST TWO OR THREE years, we at RAM have been engaged in an internal debate about media centers and the battle for computing in the living room. We disagreed about some particulars: peripherals, specifics of UI layout, local PC vs. extender models, that sort of thing. But one thing we do agree on is that no PC we've ever tried has stuck in our own living rooms because we're now too addicted to HD content, particularly on the premium channels. I'm a Comcast and HBO subscriber with a healthy appetite for Discovery HD, which is a premium, encrypted station on my service.

At first, I was vexed by Microsoft's move to drop the TV tuner requirement in Windows XP Media Center Edition. Sacrilege! Didn't these fools know that the TV tuner is the heart of their own product? But the months passed and...hmm. Well, there was my XP MCE box at the end of my test bench, having been exiled from my living room in trade for Comcast's DVR set-top—the wife's idea, not mine. But I finally saw she was right, because even I had given up flipping between the HD/premium channel-enabled set-top and my analog tuner-based MCE box. Without the digital stations, I ultimately didn't give a flying channel flip.

Now things are changing, though. We've always dissed on analog tuners because most of the good stuff resided beyond the first 125 analog channels, but now digital TV tuners are finally hitting PCs. This is different than the over-the-air tuners we've seen for a while, such as ADS Tech's Instant HD TV PCI (MCE) card and ATI's HDTV Wonder. The catch is that both require a big metal HDTV antenna, another thing that never sat well with my wife. But I'm going to wager that over-the-air HD is now effectively dead in the PC space thanks to the arrival of true digital tuners.

The key here is having a tuner with QAM, or quadrature amplitude modulation, which is the method used for encoding and transmitting digital cable channels. Wanting to have a definitive answer on this point, I went through three layers of Comcast tech support to find someone able to say positively that a QAM tuner would be able to display channels 2 through 71 plus all of the local HD broadcasts carried over Comcast. (These would appear as sub-channels, such as 6-1, 6-2, and so on.) This support rep could not say whether a QAM tuner would in fact bring in channels above 71 that were non-premium because he honestly didn't know. It's also very possible that different cable providers will implement "in the clear" digital channels in different ways. Channels that can be tuned with QAM can vary between providers and even over time with the same provider depending on how carriers opt to implement the technology. This is why you need to be careful what you promise buyers.

We'll be able to test this all for ourselves shortly. AVerMedia is about to unleash its first round of "hybrid" capture cards featuring an analog TV tuner alongside an HD QAM tuner. Now, it's true that some TVs ship with QAM tuners already installed, but the obvious advantage here is that you can harness QAM to the PC's PVR capabilities. AVerMedia supports XP (with AVerMedia's own bundled application), XP MCE, and Vista, and there will be format options including half-height x1 PCI Express, ExpressCard, and USB.

Sweet! Digital cable tuning at last! Can we finally make media center PCs a going concern? Mmm, probably not. There's still those pesky, encrypted premium channels. QAM offers no help here. Sure, if you're a die-hard geek, you could put the PC between the HD set-top box and the TV. Use the set-top to decode and pass through whatever channel you want, then display/record it with the PC. Of course, my Comcast HD DVR box lets me choose between DVI and component outputs, and by the time you'd get through devising a way to convert these into an input format the PC could accept, you'd be kicking yourself in the head for not going out and buying the DVD.

But hold on. Even before we see our first QAM cards, there's another advance waiting in the wings. ATI first showed its OCUR (OpenCable Unidirectional Receiver) reference design over a year ago at CES 2006. Now, the redubbed ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner will come in internal and USB variants and sport a CableCARD slot, just like some late model TVs, third-gen TiVo set-tops, and other devices. Essentially, a CableCARD is provided from the cable carrier and contains an ID code that the carrier uses to identify your account. The card then decrypts whichever stations the user is authorized to view. That's it. No more set-top, right? At last, we have premium HD cable to the PC, sing glory hallelujah. Are we there yet? Not at all. This is where it gets interesting. I'm reminded of a couple of lines in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when the back-stabbing financier and Nazi collaborator Walter Donovan says, "As you can now see, Dr. Jones, we are on the verge of completing a quest that began almost two thousand years ago. We're just one step away." and Jones replies, "That's usually when the ground falls out from underneath your feet."

For starters, when I had Comcast on the phone, reps told me that they'd rent me a CableCARD for $9.99 per month, the same premium I pay for a digital HD set-top. The catch is that CableCARD is still a unidirectional technology. Forget pay-per-view shows or, more important to my family, on-demand programming. Those extras require communication from the user back to the cable network, and CableCARD doesn't accommodate this. In other words, count on digital set-top boxes to stick around until CableCARD gets replaced by OCAP (OpenCable Applications Platform) implementations in three to ten years.

Next up comes a real stunner. No, not that OCUR will only work under Windows Vista. That thorn in our sides is sad but predictable. The killer is that OCUR will only be available to major OEMs for the near to foreseeable future. OK, the legalese says that you can buy OCUR if you have a DTOS (Desk Top Operating System) license agreement with Microsoft, meaning you buy your Windows direct. OCUR will not be sold into distribution. I was stunned upon learning this. System builders, probably the single best group in the world for proselytizing and crafting outstanding media center solutions, will not be allowed to sell OCUR technology unless they opt to resell a tier-one box. Brilliant. I went in search of an explanation and spoke with AMD's Blair Birmingham, group product manager, multimedia products.

"The first step for all of the parties involved in this is trusting the biggest OEMs in the world on the first implementation," he said. "Certainly, the desire on our part and Microsoft's part is to have it deployed more widely. But the cable industry wants to make sure that we're trustworthy first."

Trustworthy? What does that mean? I thought and thought about it, then spoke with Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, who specializes in graphics and multimedia market analysis. Peddie alerted me to a paper by Dr. Peter Gutmann of New Zealand called "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection" and the fact that Windows Vista is designed to turn off any digital audio output when it detects protected content going to an insecure output device. So if I wanted to use my media center PC to play next-gen 5.1 audio purchases through my home amplifer's optical S/PDIF port, it wouldn't work. Vista would close down my S/PDIF output.

If this sounds familiar, it's because this mirrors the same DRM technology we've heard about on the video side with Vista's implementation of HDCP, in which 1080 HD content is downsampled to DVD-quality resolution unless you have an HDCP-compliant closed loop from the media to the display adapter to the monitor. And sure enough, when I asked AMD's Birmingham about OCUR and HDCP, I got the expected answer.

"OCUR does have a number of security requirements including secure display outputs. When an OEM builds an OCUR-enabled PC, they ensure that it meets all security requirements before sale. Component outputs of protected content are to be constrained to 520K pixels."

That's where the trust comes in. The content owners don't trust anyone but those with the most to lose to keep that protected hardware loop closed tight, and Microsoft sure doesn't want countless end-users ranting about how their Vista MCE systems don't play media correctly.

Call it a conspiracy against the channel if you like. The tier-ones will have the superior media center technology, and there's little chance of anyone devising another legitimate way of bringing premium cable into the PC. You could argue that maybe premium cable isn't such a big deal. Maybe QAM tuners paired with emerging download services are good enough to please most users. I haven't verified it first-hand yet, but I'm betting there's about zero chance of being able to record HBO shows with an OCUR/CableCARD/Vista solution into an unprotected format like MPEG-4, so maybe the tier-ones don't have such a massive lead.

But the real problem is more insidious. The question of whether or not those video and audio ports get downsampled or suspended depends on if the content provider enables the pertinent protection codes buried in the media stream. HD DVD and Blu-ray have such codes, but they're not being enabled for at least the next few years, no doubt to help spur public adoption. Yet there are still locks on the doors. All of these new media formats and DRM schemes carry the potential for someone somewhere to flip a switch and say, "OK, as of now, if you don't support our system from end to end, all that content you own is toast." Remember, ATI demonstrated OCUR on an XP system, but the commercial version requires Vista. Microsoft holds the cards.

The newest media center extender in my living room is an Xbox 360, and it scares the hell out of me because it's so easy and effective. Think about the Xbox, Zune, and Windows Mobile phones—all of these media devices all adhering to Microsoft's DRM. The vision of tomorrow's media scene becoming a battle between Microsoft and Apple that has practically nothing to do with channel-friendly products is growing more real by the day. Zune may not have to beat the iPod if Microsoft has already outflanked Apple in the premium video space. Who owns the technology behind IPTV? Microsoft. Coincidence?

I grew up with fair use, and I think of whitebox PCs as all-powerful fair use devices. But already, I've found that music I purchased on Napster no longer works under iTunes or even Yahoo! Music. If we give up on the idea of ownership and resign ourselves to licensing everything, what comes next? Software? (We're half-way there already.) Houses? (Who really pays off a 30-year mortgage?) Spouses? (Isn't that what pre-nups are for?)

This emerging digital dystopia is almost too depressing to ponder. I will say this, though: Never before now, repurchasing my downloads and finding myself excommunicated from the course of PCTV evolution, have I felt such a strong desire to embrace Linux. Perhaps this alternative OS may yet prove to be the channel's saving grace.		  
         
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