Complex, Whole-House
Matrix Switchers May Finally
Be a Thing of the Past
Since the 2009 Consumer Electronics
Show, I have been reading technology
columns and seeing booth demonstrations
of CableCARD HDTV tuner farms from
Ceton and Silicon Dust. This promised
to be the killer product that would turn
Media Center-based solutions into the
best whole-house personal video recorder
on the market.
On a single centralized Media Center
server, one could house four to eight
HDTV tuners and stream them to
Windows 7 Media Center clients around
the home. With a Media Center server
housing CableCARD HDTV tuners,
you could easily store terabytes of HD
recorded shows and freely distribute
them to HDTVs across a standard
gigabit switch. The need
for a rack full of CableCARD set-top boxes controlled by
a complex, whole-house matrix switcher would be a design
and installation of the past.
But 2009 and 2010 went by without a solution that we
could implement for our clients. Niveus Media had a two
CableCARD HDTV tuner solution for a while, but that
was discontinued last year when the company stopped
producing hardware products. S1 Digital had a four-ATI
CableCARD HDTV tuner based server solution last year,
but when ATI stopped making its USB CableCARD
HDTV tuners, that solution went away as well. So hopes
for a true HDTV tuner farm have ebbed and flowed for
more than two years now.
|
|
With the Media Center platform and the Ceton InfiniTV 4, you
have the ultimate HDTV and DVD/Blu-ray movie storage and
serving solution to offer.
| |
But as of this May, the wait appeared to finally be over.
In my own home I have installed a 7.5-terabyte Media Center server
from Epicenter with the Ceton InfiniTV 4 PCI Express tuner card and
Ceton’s newly released network tuner sharing firmware. I have reliably
and repeatedly streamed live and recorded HDTV content across my
gigabit network to the HP TouchSmart Media Center in the kitchen, the
Epicenter Mini-Player Media Center connected to a Samsung 55-inch
LED TV in the master bedroom, and the Windows 7 Media Center in
the office. With the fourth available tuner, I plan to stream content across
my wireless N network to the newly released Epicenter Tablet that runs
Windows 7 Media Center. I saw the performance of this solution at my
home and was amazed by the clarity and resolution of the HDTV streams.
Attaching this 10-inch tablet to a swing arm mount can give clients that
want a thin TV in their kitchen or master bath (for example) a solution
that gives them access to HDTV without the need for a separate cable
box. And it gives them access to not only live HDTV, but also any of
the recorded HD content on the home’s central Media Center server.
No other whole-house DVR solution on the market today from the
satellite providers, phone providers, or CableCARD TiVos can provide
as extensive, scalable, and flexible whole-house PVR solution.
But this story gets even better. With additional software, Media Center
servers have the ability to rip, store, and catalog DVD/Blu-ray movies for
storing and serving around the home. Netflix and Amazon have movie
download services that can also stream movies to smart TVs, but movies
are always released on DVD/Blu-ray before Netflix and Amazon. With
the Media Center platform and the Ceton InfiniTV 4, you have the
ultimate HDTV and DVD/Blu-ray movie storage and serving solution
to offer the following:
■ One common graphical interface to navigate HDTV and DVD/
Blu-ray movies
■ The capacity to stream live and recorded HDTV and DVD/Bluray
movies to up to 10 Media Center clients simultaneously
■ The ability to record and view HDTV shows from any Media
Center platform.
And probably the most important feature of all–it really works! After
a month of testing in my home (Ceton has been successfully beta-testing
network tuner sharing for the past seven months) I have found that when
the network and switch are properly designed, and the Media Center
servers and clients have the proper horsepower, memory, and are clean of
all OEM “bloatware,” you have a robust and reliable movie distribution
solution.
The main limitation of the Ceton tuner cards is that they must be
installed in a Media Center
server with open PCI
Express slots. Generally,
that is not an issue, because
you will still need a Media
Center server to store and
catalog TV and movie
content–and these servers
often have open PCI
Express slots–but an even
more flexible solution would
be to have the HDTV
tuner farm box directly
attached to the network.
That solution now appears
imminent after Silicon Dust’s announcement of an end-of-July shipping
date for the three- and six-CableCARD HDTV tuner HDHomeRun
Prime products. We will anxiously await the release of these products to
see if they perform well. If they do, it would be logical for us to use these
products as a tuner farm box in the distribution panel of each of our cable
TV clients’ homes.
While the cloud may contain our clients’ data, photos, videos, and
some of the TV and movies they may want to watch, it doesn’t contain
HDTV tuners, which must be located within our clients’ homes. Now, for
the first time, we can create “tuner clouds” inside our customers’ homes,
as well.