Optik expansion card for home theater PC users

[Caboose]

Home Theater PCs (HTPC) are growing in popularilty, and while you can route your TV through a HTPC with a video capture card, it's a lot of added equipment and cables. In the states, there are CableCards which allow subscribers to have the cable feed directly in to their HTPC and access all the content as if they used an (external/standard) STB (Set Top Box).

It would be great if TELUS offered an expansion card for those of us using HTPCs.

[Dark_Knight]

Interesting idea @Caboose  - Are you talking about what used to be called media center PCs? Basically it runs windows and you plug it into a home theater system with HDMI/VGA/etc ?

Do you have examples of carriers in the US that offer this service? I'd be interested to see how they work and what the performance is like. 

[Caboose]

@Dark_Knight Essentally ya. Media Centre and Home Theater PC (HTPC) are the same thing. The majority of them run Windows, but there are some that run Linux (the expansion card I suggested would be Windows supported, but hopefully there'd be Linux drivers for it as well). They usually connect to the TV via HDMI or Component video through the video card. The HDMI cable will still provide security/encryption. The computer's hard drive would allow PVR functionality.

I think that Time Warner uses Cablecards. Shaw does, but are limited to their own STBs. I believe that Rogers and bell both do as well.

It would require you to use the coax connection on the Actiontec V1000h instead of Cat5e as it would need its own method of connecting to the network, PCs can connect via WiFi if a hardwired connection isn't available.

Or TELUS could get their own custom card manufactured which uses an ethernet jack for both data and TV. It would replace the onboard NIC in the PC, but would allow everything to run over a single ethernet cable.

[ShadiS]

Hi @Caboose ,

Thanks for sharing your idea with us. We are reviewing it and will get back to you when we have updates.

Please keep the great ideas coming!

Take care,

Shadi

[ShadiS]

Hi @Caboose ,

Once again thank you for sharing your idea but after further review we will not be moving forward with this suggestion. Please continue to share great ideas.

Take care,

Shadi