gitarzan

Thank you for the link. I am a regular reader at avsforum. I keep up with the stuff in the rear projection forum there. I also try to keep up with satellite technology at dbsforum and satelliteguys. I have been watching for news about cable cards over the last year. Kind of hard to find but anandtech.com very recently had a nice write up on a Dell system with a cablecard tuner. I am afraid the digital rights laws are stifling progress in that area. Cablecard solutions seem to me have the most promise for building a near perfect PC DVR. It doesn't sound if I will be able to get a cablecard tuner outside of a full blown cablelabs certified ssytem for a long time if ever. My modded original XBOX xbox media center continues to be my media player of choice by far, just no TV or DVR functionality. I now have Vista Home Premium with Windows Media Center. That and in conjuction with my XBOX 360 and Media Center extender works very well. I am running an HDTV USB stick tuner with my Vista Media center but it only gets local channels OTA. It works very nice but I want more channels and an all digital solution.

I subscribe to Insight cable in Lexington KY (everything but the premium channels, HBO etc). Is there a way to know if the digital channels I get are unencrypted and can be received by this device? I know that some are but should I expect most to be. ie. ESPN, MTV, SciFI, etc. I build my computers. Tired of waiting on a cable card solution and this looks like a promising alternative. thank you,