Have not heard much about ACE, but they are planning to debut an OCUR PC with one tuner for less than $1000. I will be watching closely, as they are located near me. Hope they have TV Pack and options do not bring it too high in price.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/02/ace-computers-promises-999-cablecard-htpc-at-ces-2009/
Lets hope the competition follows suit. Another thing going for ACE is that their unit comes in a AV component form factor. From the partial image I had seen last night...it comes in silver. I'll be looking for information about the depth of the case. 14" is my max.
Well I guess thats a good thing ;)
I was toying with the idea of buying a cablecard system from HP and was just online configuring it:
m9400t series
Operating system Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Pack 1 for digital cable tuner (64-bit)
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Quad processor Q6600 (2.4GHz) Memory FREE UPGRADE! To 4GB DDR2-800MHz dual channel SDRAM (4x1024) from 2GB Graphics card 512MB ATI Radeon HD 3650 [DVI, VGA, HDMI]
Hard drive 320GB 7200 rpm SATA 3Gb/s hard drive
Networking LAN port on system board (10/100/1000Base-T), no wireless LAN Primary DVD/CD drive LightScribe 16X max. DVD+/-R/RW SuperMulti drive Front Productivity Ports 15-in-1 memory card reader, 2 USB, 1394, audio, video (for TV Tuner) TV & entertainment experience ATI TV Wonder external digital cable tuner + internal TV tuner
Sound Card Integrated 7.1 channel sound with front audio ports Productivity software Microsoft(R) Works 9.0
Security software Norton Internet Security(TM) 2009 - 15 month
Speakers No speakers
Keyboard and Mouse HP keyboard and HP optical mouse
Total: $1,049.99*
I don't see ~$50 as something worth waiting for if I were so inclined to buy now, which I am not. I figure I would wait for "Windows 7" or at least a free upgrade offer to "Windows 7" from Vista,....if that ever happens for OCUR systems.
I'm just a little worried about Tru2Way coming along and screwing everything up for these OCUR systems.
Great setup but in my opinion HP's tower configuration doesn't fit well in an entertainment center. I agree with you that we need more guidance on Tru2Way. Hopefully we'll hear more about that from CES this week.
Well my physical setup can tolerate an HP tower case. Right now our main Vista Media Center PC in the bedroom (an old upgraded m1070n) is hidden behind our 40" HDTV so you can't see it and everything can breath. Esthetics can be worked with (I don't really want to see the case at all) its just not even a consideration for me really.
RCN cable in NYC just went through digital crush so we lost all our analog channels. No longer can we connect a TV or PC TV tuner to a raw cable feed and get a full non-premium analog line-up,...now we get nothing in this respect. We still get about ~130+ Clear QAM channels after the so called upgrade but I hear this will go to nothing but local channels soon.
I can see having one OCUR system with maybe "Vista Ultimate" or "Windows 7 Ultimate" in order to support up to 4x OCUR units but I have no real trust that this is a long term solution given my cable co willingness to change at the chagrin of the customer.
Naturally, I want guaranties if I am going to plunk down ~$1000 or more on an OCUR system.