ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner: AMD and Dell Bring CableCARD to PCs

DIY and the Future of OCUR

Microsoft has a vested interest in the success of not only the TV Wonder DCT but all OCUR products for Vista. For Microsoft to be at the center of the digital home, all content needs to be stored on the PC - music, movies and television all need to come in to the PC and then get sent to all of the networked devices in the home for consumption. Bringing cable TV to PCs has been done time and time again, but Microsoft seemed to miss the HD boat. OCUR changes all of that....

Microsoft, not AMD, wrote the Vista driver for the TV Wonder DCT, so any driver bugs are actually Microsoft's responsibility and not AMD's. The reason why Microsoft is the author of the driver and AMD just the hardware manufacturer is because Microsoft wants more companies to make OCUR devices, and it wants a single driver for any OCUR under Vista. If another manufacturer chooses to go through the necessary steps to create an OCUR for Vista, it will work with the same driver that the TV Wonder DCT does.

The long term goal is this: Microsoft (and AMD) hopes that a new class of PCs will become available in the market. These PCs will be labeled "Digital Cable Ready", meaning that they meet all of the hardware, software, and protected path requirements necessary to support an OCUR device. Given that the requirements are fairly easy to fulfill, it wouldn't be too far fetched to have most PCs on retail shelves be Digital Cable Ready in a year or two.

With a good number of Digital Cable Ready PCs on the market, the next phase would be to introduce a retail OCUR product. AMD told us that if the conditions are right, it will introduce a retail version of the TV Wonder DCT for use with a Digital Cable Ready Vista PC. Given that the first TV Wonder DCT systems have yet to even ship, it will clearly be a while before enough of them get out there to make AMD consider releasing a retail product.

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 OCCUR; 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.