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Installment 00A of The Custom Integrator Show is live.  This installment is a continuation of understanding the Digital Cable Tuner (DCT) and CableCARD architectures and how to troubleshoot them.

Installment 009 of The Custom Integrator Show is not quite live yet, but we wanted to get the screen captures related to what we will be discussing out there ahead of time so you can use them as reference materials when you listen to the actual Podcast.  For this installment, we really start digging into the guts of the Digital Cable Tuner (DCT) by looking at the Man-Machine Interface (MMI) screens hosted by the web server built into the DCT itself.  There is a lot of good information buried in there, but you have to know what to look for and understand what they are telling you.

The Custom Integrator Show Installment 007 is live. In this installment, we finally start to dive into one of the more troublesome aspects of the Windows Media Center ecosystem – Digital Cable Tuners (DCTs). Many integrators criticize Microsoft for their CableCARD implementation and find it to be cumbersome and convoluted. Putting it into perspective, however, one must realize that Microsoft provides the only PC-based platform that even supports CableCARDs. They just have to live by the rules set up by CableLabs and its constituents, which really are a nightmare when you actually dig down into the guts of them. Granted, it is not exactly easy to get it up and running well, but if it is installed and configured properly, it does actually work – and work well. This installment covers the initial setup and some of the basic steps you need to take as part of ensuring a successful experience.  Installment 008 will start to drill down into the technical specifics of the CableCARD pipeline and several steps to take when troubleshooting the platform.