ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuners

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Unfortunately things don't look too good for DIY-ers at this point; AMD mentioned that it currently has no intentions to release a TV Wonder DCT that would work with a home built system. The limitation stems from the BIOS flag requirement of OCUR; without the necessary BIOS flag present Vista and the TV Wonder DCT hardware will not function. Currently that BIOS flag is only being provided to OEMs who will be producing Digital Cable Ready PCs, and not to motherboard manufacturers for use in their own motherboard designs. It is highly likely that simply adding support for the flag to an unsupported motherboard may be possible in the future, once more is known about this flag and how Vista reads it. However according to AMD, unless that requirement is lifted you won't see an official solution for DIY-ers.

Future compatibility is somewhat guaranteed with the ATI TV Wonder DCT. Multi-stream cards will be supported but they will only function in single card compatibility mode. Future bidirectional cards will not work however and they will require a new tuner, currently called BOCR (Bidirectional Open Cable Receiver). AMD informed us that BOCR would be a brand new product to be released in the middle of 2008 at the earliest. Upon the release of a BOCR product, you can expect OCUR to possibly move into a lower price point.

[...]The TV signal issues we ran into were only the tip of the iceberg, because we were only able to run into them after we got the system set up. Although AMD and Dell have been working extensively with cable providers to make sure the installation process of Digital Cable Ready PCs goes as smoothly as possible, we are very skeptical of how smoothly this process will be at this point. We've already seen how much of a pain a simple CableCARD installation can be, and tossing a PC into the mix complicates things even further. Cable technicians aren't generally good PC hardware techs, and PC hardware techs can't really diagnose/repair cable network problems. Either the entire system will have to be virtually flawless or a new type of super tech will have to be bred in order to aid in OCUR installations.