Bierboy said:
That should not be the case. You should be able to use it just fine without the cablecard.
Yeah. That's my assumption as well- you should be able to record over the Air Digital and HiDef just fine. Dan203 does not think that it will have analog inputs like the SA, and he is usually right about such things. But because the cablecard spec says you have to support NTSC video with a tuner, so the CC Tivo would be able to display analog Cable channels. If you can display it, then it would be wierd if you couldn't record it. If you can record it, then you have to have an Mpeg encoder, probably mpeg2. If you have an mpeg2 encoder, then you can easily offer analog inputs like the SA. But if you add that, then you have to offer IR blaster support. So you start to pull at the thread and next thing you know you are unraveling the entire sweater. At some point program management puts a halt to the feature creap.
Where the line is drawn will be known very very soon. But in favor of analog inputs, this would allow multi mode, multivendor carriers- a product that is good for consumers since users could easily switch between carrier vendors from month to month based on how good their service and prices were.
So there is a technical and economic argument for analog inputs. It may well not be available due to concerns about engineering complexity or keeping the price as low as possible. Personally I'd like the analog inputs. Heck- I'd love SDI inputs. If they'd offer that, we could probably hack the Satellite boxes so we could re
nyjklein said:
Yes, you can plug it in but it may not work!
First of all, everyone's hoping that TiVo will end up using a Cablecard 2.0 (or at least multistream) card. What you can get today is a 1.0 card.
No reasonable person is expecting cablecard 2.0 support because cablecard 2.0 is not even finalized. You are correct about multistream. The cable industry HAS indicated to the FCC that multistream cards should be available by mid 2006, and people are hoping (with good reason) that Tivos will support them when they come out. I am betting they support two cablecard 1.0 cards, which the user can upgrade to one multistream card in the future. Although multistream appears on the Cablecard 2.0 feature list, these multistream cards are not 2.0 cards.
nyjklein said:
Also, most (if not all) cable providers tie their cablecards to the specific hardware it's installed in (this is part of the iinitialization process when the card is installed). So, you need to call the provider when moving the card from one device to another and the provider may be reluctant to authorize your TiVo if they haven't tested it.
When cablecard hosts are certified by CableLabs as being compliant, the local carrier is in no position to disallow a particular cablecard device. They are subject to FCC sanctions if they do. Tivo has a certfied host according to CableLabs. Cable companies are required by FCC regulation to offer cablecards and all the majors now do. Cable companies do not have the option of declining to support cablecard devices which are certified as being cablecard compliant.