ATI's new TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner is an OCUR (Open Cable Unidirectional Receiver) tuner, meaning it can accept CableCard signals and send them to your computer. Like the CableCard slots in the TiVo Series3, OCUR devices can accept digital cable signals, but cannot send, meaning you can't get advanced features like video on demand.
But you can record shows in Vista Media Center without a cable box and IR blaster.
The TV Wonder comes in internal and external varieties. The external unit is a USB 2.0 box, while the internal version fits into a PCI or PCIe slot, but actually communicates with your computer via USB 2.0, and has a separate power cable. The only real advantage to putting it inside your case is that it takes up less space.
In order to use the card, you need an OCUR compliant PC, running Windows Vista with Media Center capabilities.
1. This is great and sad. I am happy to see HD cable capability for media center PC's but this also seems to imply that all existing MCE PC's are non-compatible. We now have to go and buy a new machine to get HDTV on our MCE.
Posted at 10:40PM on Jan 8th 2007 by Brett Griffin