Worth Reading?
-1 [3 votes]
Bad news if you’re the sort of person who starts feeling guilty at having recorded dozens of shows but not actually watched any of them: Cannon PC have just released a demo video of their latest Windows Media Center mod, simultaneously recording six high-definition programs via six separate CableCARDs. If you’re not familiar with Media Center, you might not see why that’s special; not only does the OS only natively support two CableCARDs, but usually gobbling up all that HD footage would quickly gobble up all your CPU cycles.
Check out the demo video after the cut
What they’ve managed, then, is doubly-interesting. Not only do the six cards play nicely, thanks to some judicious modifications by Cannon PC’s specialists, but overall performance is hardly impacted despite the ongoing recording and playback. This means - assuming you buy one of the company’s upcoming Media Centers using the technology - multiple viewers in your home can watch different live broadcasts at the same time.
Six CableCARDs might just be the start of it, too. Cannon don’t see any reason why the number should be limited to just half a dozen, plus they claim to have plenty of other ideas in the pipeline. The company’s range starts from $1,299 and climbs to massive amounts, but there’s no word on when extra CableCARD support will be available.
[via eHomeUpgrade]
Never got why that should take CPU, I got an older setup (PVR-500 2x, MythTV, Linux) and because the cards are doing all the work, the only thing that should be high is your IO to disks (writing that last episode of Heroes in mpeg straight to disk )
To bad that there is only one reason to have so many streams at once, they all send out there best shows at the same time. :)