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News, Analysis, and Opinion on Microsoft Digital Media Technologies (and TGB News!)

More on Cannon PCs Six CableCARD PC

On Friday Cannon PC demoed a system recording from six CableCARDs all at once, while playing back a recording and the system didn’t skip a beat.  This was demoed in the YouTube video, but I got some higher resolution screenshots of Media Center showing the six streams at once.

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Given the system resources that they had to spare, what do people think the max number of tuners would be?  Considering local playback most likely added from 5-10% on ~35% of the CPU being used, I think this shows that processing speed is no longer a bottle neck for Media Center PCs.  So the question is which dies first, USB throughput or the hard drive(s)?

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Cross Posted from Chris Lanier's Blog at http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/
Published Jun 22 2008, 10:21 AM by Chris - Moderator
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Comments

 

erwos said:

If you're using a modern SATA drive, I would assume you'd run out of USB bandwidth or possibly IOPS _way_ before your SATA drive had bandwidth or IOPS issues. Less so for an older IDE drive, but I still imagine that would outpace it.
June 23, 2008 5:56 AM
 

hamiltonguy said:

I am curious about how many it could support, but how many do people actually need?  6 seems like about the max you would need, 4 tv's in a home, plus two for recording?  
June 23, 2008 12:10 PM
 

Chris - Moderator said:

Of course how many you need depends on your setup, viewing habits, and most of all number of independent viewers on Extenders.  For a 2-3 person family, I'd like 3-4 would be fine.  Now for a 4-5 person family using 4-5 Extenders independently I think 6-8 tuners would be best.
June 23, 2008 3:08 PM
 

DenCollins said:

It surprises me that any manufacture would go to such lengths to develop a system to do this. While the idea is good, especially for households that have multiple x-boxes or extenders.

The question remains "Is there still hope for the Cable card?" Considering all the information that I've read concerning that the cable card will soon be obsolete, what tech savvy end user would make an investment in such a system?
June 25, 2008 6:36 AM


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