At least that is if want to be able to do stuff with premium CableCard content and probably DirecTV content. According to Matt Goyer's recent post you won't be able to do it.
"Q: Will I be able to buy a cablecard reader off the shelf, a video card off the shelf and be able to playback [OCUR] content?
A: No."
This has been the rumored belief for a while, but it is good to have it confirmed. What this means is you will be forced to buy a semi-closed box from a company such as Dell or HP on the low end or Niveus on the high end. One saving grace may be semi pre-built but highly customizable systems like Shuttle's XPC M.
This is unfortunate by understandable. The Cable industry is very concerned about protected content becoming easily and freely available. To get CableLabs certification the device must be a complete and essentially closed box. Each system will have to be certified as a solution not an individual component. The one upside to this is you will have a solution that is guaranteed to work and is supported.
I was considering building my own MCE box sometime in the future. Now it is apparent that I will be forced to wait for Vista to ship and system builders to release their own certified solutions. Hopefully I can buy one that isn't too expensive and then add things like extra RAM or disk space myself. Also it will be interesting to see if certain system builders go with HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray and will there be any to offer both.
My major remaining concern is can additional tuners be added. If the box is sold with one or two tuners but I want more can I upgrade? The tuners I am talking about here are OCUR or DirecTV, since adding OTA HDTV tuners seem to have no controls on them.
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