HTPC junkies have been simultaneously looking forward to and dreading this day: the review embargo on CableCard media center PCs has been lifted.

What on earth is a CableCard? Back in the days before digital cable, getting your computer to display a TV signal was relatively straightforward. You either bought an ATI All-In-Wonder card, like I did (and never will again, no thanks to the continuing degradation of ATI’s drivers and MMC tuner software) or you got a regular video card and an add-on tuner card like a Hauppauge PVR-150. You took the coax cable running out of your wall, screwed it into the back of the tuner card, fired up the TV software, and voila—television in a window on your desktop! You could even do nifty things like timeshifting like a PVR and watching television as a translucent display on top of the OS. I could be watching full-screen TV while writing this post, if there was anything good on now.

Unfortunately, none of this is any good if you want to watch HDTV. Your computer can handle it, but because digital cable is so much better in picture quality, combining it with a computer means instant recipe for widespread piracy. At least, that’s the justification the cable providers give for encumbering their set-top digital cable boxes with DRM, turning off the Firewire ports so you can’t watch recorded shows off the hard drive on your computer, and all sorts of haberdashery to thwart anyone that’s even thinking of watching digital cable on their computer. Up until CableCare, your only real options were the following:

• Buy yourself an ATSC tuner card, of which there are now quite a few on the market. Get yourself an HD antenna that’ll pick up digital signals. Plug the antenna into your card. Cancel the cable and watch over-the-air digital broadcasts. This is by far the best way to get full-quality HD broadcasts (digital cable providers tend to compress the digital television signals in order to fit more of them down that coaxial cable) but it means you lose access to all your cable channels. Plus this won’t work very well if you don’t live close to a couple of HD broadcast towers, and you might even have to buy an outdoor HDTV antenna. If you want to go ahead and relive the 70s, be my guest, but I ain’t climbing on no roof.
• Buy yourself a QAM tuner card, which are rarer and not well marked (often ATSC tuners double as QAM tuners, but not always). Plug your cable into the tuner card. This works well for unencrypted channels (i.e. the major networks) but doesn’t work at all for encrypted channels (probably all your basic/premium cable channels, and maybe all your channels if your cable company is a dick). Plus no OS actually has support for QAM tuners yet, so until Vista gets QAM support you’re stuck trying the beta versions of tuner programs made by the manufacturer of your tuner (Avermedia and Hauppauge have software for their QAM-enabled cards, apparently). All this info can only be gleaned by diving into several HTPC forums and sorting through the mess that is the current state of HD-ready tuner cards.
• Buy yourself a normal analog tuner card, like the aforementioned PVR-150. Make sure it comes with an IR blaster, which you’ll use to control the set-top digital cable box you already own. Plug your cable into the set-top box, then plug the output of the box into your computer. Disadvantages: you can’t watch high-definition programming any more because everything gets dumped back to crappy analog NTSC. Plus you have to use an IR blaster to change channels, because cable companies won’t allow you to do the obvious thing of plugging the set-top box directly into the computer to control it.
• Download all your shows via bittorrent and tell your cable company to fuck off.

But now CableCard is here, and it promises to solve all those problems and return us to the bliss of “buy a card, plug in your cable, watch TV.” Of course, because we live in the fully digital age now, nothing can ever be that simple again; CableCard comes with its own set of proprietary DRM standards intended to dissuade anyone from copying and sharing HD programming with their friends. Anyone who’s dealt with DRM on a regular basis knows what this means: another giant recipe for frustration.

Engadget has up two reports of a Vista CableCard installation. One went very smoothly, which is how you’d hope these sorts of installs would go. The other had reports of stuttering and other nasties, even after several Time Warner and Microsoft people went over the whole setup and discarded multiple CableCards.

Plus there’s a short FAQ about what to expect from CableCard setups. Here’s one question:

Can’t I just add a cable card tuner to my Vista box?

Sorry, no. Vista CableCARD boxes are special units certified to meet CableLabs spec; they’re loaded with special firmware, and the tuners are only sold with the units. Assuming you did get your hands on a tuner, you’d still have to figure out a way to hack that firmware onto your unit. Unfortunately, unless someone comes up with something crazy we just don’t see how it can be done, short of buying a new unit. Yes, we’re as totally bummed about this as you are. Blame CableLABS and their obsession with DRM.

So basically you’d have to buy a brand new media center PC with CableCard in order to take advantage. You might as well just buy a TiVo or a set-top box from your cable provider and be done with it, because that’s about how locked down these new HTPCs are going to be.

In short, why on earth would you bother with the hassle and the expense of doing all this when it’ll just cause you a lot of grief? All the recorded video will be locked down with DRM and won’t even play on other networked devices except Microsoft-approved extenders. Portable devices? Other computers? Forget it. You’re basically buying a very expensive set-top box with a pretty interface, and for what?