Cable Card, Fios, and Vista Media Center

As some of you know I am a big HDTV buff, and love watching HDTV. I also am a big fan of Microsoft's Media Center, which allows your PC to act like a DVR. I prefer it's functionality and features over those such as TIVO, or features that your Cable Company's DVR has. Some of you may have seen how we have organized our DVD Collection on the disk of a server downstairs, and any Vista Media Center PC in the house can view those DVD's.



Here is a picture of what the DVD Gallery menu looks like:

This allows Caleb, or anyone in our household to pick a DVD via the DVD's Cover Art, get information on the movie, and also play it. No more kids scratching up dvd's, or dvd's being left around all over the house. This can be done on any Vista Premium/Ultimate install, as long as you have enough disk space for the DVD's.



The entertainment center is also new, we got it on clearance at Walmart for $79. It moves the TV up high enough to where the kids won't accidently hit it, and I will no longer have to clean up fingerprints on the tv daily. The TV is a 32" Westinghouse 720p LCD TV.



Here is a picture of one of the best features of this entertainment center, it has a moveable arm, allowing me to move the tv to the left or right, depending on where we are in the room. This pictures also is HD MTV viewed via Vista Media Center.

Now back to the main point of the post. Most of us have cable, and we rent those Settop Boxes from our cable provider. This really works fine with Vista Media Center if you are recording Standard Definition content, but what about HD? The only real solution is the CableCard solution. Essentially one buys a new PC that is CableCard certified, in my case we purchased the Dell XPS 420 with two Digital Cable Card tuners from ATI. Once setup, as you see above, I called Verizon FIOS TV to setup an appointment to install two cablecards. It did take two trips for them to get both cards working. Important Notes are:



1. Update Firmware to latest, 1.16 currently, available from ATI

2. Install all Windows Updates that are available

3. Disable Windows Firewall for the Tuners

4. Disable Antivirus for the time being, some cause issues during install



I was paying $30 a month in DVR and SetTopBox boxes every month, now we pay $8 a month for the rental of two CableCards. These cablecards go inside the two Digital Cable Card tuners, bottom right of the entertainment center with the green lights. Once inside and activated, they can now receive any content that you would get with a DVR or Settop Box, and you can now view this content inside Vista Media Center, and also record anything you want via Vista Media Center. Your recording limits are only limited to the amount of available Harddrive space you have.



Now, with this setup, one TV in the house has cable service, what about the rest? Well, in our Living Room we have an Xbox 360 for my gaming pleasures :) The Xbox360 is also a Media Center Extender, meaning it can play any media files on the Media Center PC in the Family Room, and use either of the Tuners on that Media Center PC. So now, I simply turn on the Xbox 360, have it boot into the MEdia Center Extender interface, and watch TV as I would normally, without a Settop Box.



Here's a pic:

This is a Westinghouse 42" 1080p LCD monitor, displaying Live TV via my Xbox 360 Extender. We also have a custom built Vista Media Center connected to the LCD as well. The main reason for that is that the Extenders cannot playback hard drive based DVD's like you saw in the beginning of the post. Therefore we still use the PC for playing back DVD's at 1080p, and for those times when computer gaming requires a 42" screen :)



Lastly, we still have a bedroom, which is sometimes given to Robyn's grandmother when she visits. Naturally, we want her, or anyone else in the room to be able to watch live tv. So therefore we have another Xbox 360, to display Live TV, or any Recordings, to our old 20" CRT Standard Def TV. I am hoping 2008 will see an upgrade for the bedroom to an LCD TV.

So in short, I've spent quite a bit of money, the XPS 420 was $1300 with the tuners, and a 4 year warranty. The Xbox 360's have their obvious uses as gaming consoles as well as being Media Center extenders. But we now have no more settop boxes we rent, saving us money every month, and we have one central location where recordings are stored . No longer does Robyn have to go through and delete old recordings because the Cable companies DVR only had 160GB's available. We have started out with 250GB in this case, with a 500GB drive soon being added. This is in addition to 1.5TB we have currently for our DVD's. With this setup you also have the ability to setup recordings from the PC, or from either of the Xbox 360 extenders. Currently we have a total of 3 tuners, 2 for Digital/HD Cable, one for the Local HD channels.



The viewing works kind of the way Satellite used to, I have 2 Digital/HD Cable feeds, if someone is on each the computer, and both of the 360's one of them will have the same channel as the other, unless they are using tuner #3 for the Local HD channels. All in all, we do not watch enough TV to have to worry about this, but the cable card PC can manage using up to 4 digital tuners, although they sell at around $300 per tuner.



I should also mention, that the Xbox 360's will need ethernet connections to the Vista Media Center PC, or 802.11A or N network gear, in order to be able to playback live TV, especially any HD content. So far this is a definite plus for us, as it allows us to get away from bad coax cable runs inside of the home, and instead rely on wireless and wired networking to host our TV viewing. It is also easy to move say the bedroom tv and xbox 360 to anywhere in the house, if we feel the need to have a TV there.



So that's my story, I'm happy, and am amazed at how well it is working. I will say, do a lot of research, specifically at http://www.thegreenbutton.com/ before jumping into this. It's not for the faint of heart for the setup, I did get frustrated, and would not recommend setting it up on 4 hours of sleep :)



-Dravor