One thing I was really disappointed in when I picked up my Cable Card Vista Media Center system was the fact that when you use the ATI DCT’s FM Radio in MCE no longer worked. TV Pack fixed this so if you have a DCT machine and miss FM install the TV pack, slap an old analog tuner with a FM input in the machine and get ready to be able to Rock & Roll again.

There have been many people not happy with this release but in my opinion it is a nice incremental release.

First off QAM is big. Add to that the ability for MCE to FINALLY realize that Fox through my DCT is the same thing as Fox through ATSC is the same thing as Fox through QAM and map them all to the same channel. Now instead of having Fox as channel 4, 804 and 1004 and having to set a recording to one of those channels only if I wanted it to be in HD I only have channel 4 and I can even set the tuner preference so it uses QAM before using one of my DCT’s.

Speaking of HD I love the "HD Only" and "HD preferred" options when setting a series recording. I always set to HD preferred because then if I am setting a series recording on a channel that I currently only get in SD and my cable co. adds a HD version it will automagically switch over.

Finally FM Radio works again. When I set up cable card tuners before the TV Pack it broke FM but it is back!

Is there some "missing pieces"… Yes, but I still firmly believe that MCE is the best DVR out there.

It looks like digital cable withouth a cable box is almost here. ATI’s OCUR was demonstrated at this years CES show working with MCE. I am a DirecTV guy myself (I refuse to have anything to do with Comcast) but for others this will be the end all be all of tuners. Now where is my DirecTV tuner….

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2662&p=2

Looks like some really cool things are coming down the pike. Cable Card support, new SKY stuff as well as a whole lot more. Check it out at the link below.

http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspx