Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Whoa.  Check this out:

Cable Card :  Who needs it?
http://www.hometoys.com/article.php4?displayid=980

Put simply, these folks have figured out how to implement high definition recording on Windows Media Centers without Cable Cards.  Even better, the recordings are made in .WMV files that are completely sans-DRM.

At the center of all of this is the AVerMedia AverTV Combo PCIe MCE tuner card.

We simply put an off-the-shelf AVerMedia AverTV Combo PCIe MCE tuner card into a Windows Vista-based PC with Windows Media Center and let Windows Update load the appropriate drivers. This tuner card supports QAM connectivity in addition to NTSC. It also supports Over The Air (OTA) ATSC, but we did not use it for this installation. We plugged in the standard USB Microsoft eHome IR Receiver as we normally would and attached the IR blaster to the Set Top Box as we would using the lousy-looking standard definition S-Video solution provided by Microsoft.

This hooked up to a Motorola Set Top Box, specifically the QIP6200-2 in this case – the 6416 with the DVR does not have a RF output:

We initially assumed that Windows Media Center would use the NTSC tuner capability and require us to use Channel 3 or 4 to match the NTSC output from the Set Top Box, but much to our surprise, the standard TV setup procedure found the QAM signal and used it for the TV input without requiring any other setup. It then asked us if we had a Set Top Box, which we configured the same way we normally do. Voila! We were receiving “in the clear” high definition video unencrypted by the Set Top Box. We can record it, copy it to other machines, and stream it to any number of devices we want.

In case you didn’t get that, the Windows Media Center can directly read the high definition signal coming out of the receiver and completely control the receiver remotely directly through the connection between the AverMedia card and the Motorola Set Top Box.

CRAZY!