Originally Posted by hrlslcbr
Oooooh, nice one
But seriously, it may be too early to draw any real parallels.
A quick look at the announced supported software may be worthwhile though:
Software Support:
Microsoft® Windows® XP Media Center Edition
Microsoft® Windows® Vista
ATI Catalyst Media Center ™
Snapstream BeyondTV
Cyberlink Powercinema
Intervideo Home Theater
MCE is known to support ATSC and NTSC and Vista/Vista MCE should be no different other then added support for cable-card and the like. Vista isn’t available now but for all we know it might be before these product hit retail selves.
Do take note that Vista logo cards will likely comply with a “protected path” that many of today’s cards do not. In short, a robust DRM feature set in such cards is certain.
Cyberlink Powercinema doesn’t, AFAIK, support ATSC. Therefore, Theater 650 Pro cards that support ATSC and that ship with Powercinema will have an updated/modified version or seemingly the software wouldn’t support the ATSC feature. Again, AFAIK, the same is true of Intervideo Home Theater with respect to ATSC.
BTV, is common to the two and would seem to support the NTSC/ATSC features (as does MCE and Vista MCE).
ATI Catalyst Media Center will hopefully be what many MMC users have been waiting for. In any case, at least ATI took the time to develop their own in-house software with respect to MMC and CMC. Most MCE, future Vista MCE users and BeyondTV users probably couldn’t be bothered with either MMC or CMC though.