Ed Bott has an interesting find about DirecTV and Windows 7. Long time follows of Media Center will remember that DirecTV announced they were bring DirecTV to Windows Media Center back at CES in 2006. Up to now there have been plenty or rumours but no real evidence it was ever going to happen, but Ed may have spotted a driver for it in Windows 7:

So imagine my surprise when I found a signed driver for this device in the pre-beta build of Windows 7 distributed at PDC. Here, see for yourself:

Drivers for DirecTV HDPC-20 tuner are in beta builds of Windows 7

It’s the latest piece of evidence that suggests maybe this long-delayed device will actually appear sometime next year.

Now that H.264 is added to Windows 7 this may just be the missing piece to pull it all together,  read Ed’s post for the rest of his thoughts

0 thoughts on “DirecTV’s HD tuner set to debut with Windows 7?”
  1. Hi Ian,
    For the media-illiterate…can you explain what H.264 is? I hear/read you mention it all the time but dn’t have a clue what it is.

    Thanks
    Jamie

  2. H.264 is a compression standard in the same way MPEG and WMV are. It is a pretty efficient algorithm and has been used for a lot of high definition video encoding.

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