Cable Cards 2.0 - Coming in 2006 {Engadget HD}

Nov 8th 2005 12:03PM CableCARD 1.0 supports only a single MPEG2 transport stream; i.e. single digital tuner. The Single Stream card (S-Card) was previously called POD; "Point of Deployment". It exists a special variant of PCMCIA. When power is applied the card, it will look and act like a 16-bit PC memory card, albeit a very small one. Only during configuration can the host determine that it is an S-Card. Once the card has been identified, the host and S-Card change personalities and the interface changes from PCMCIA to S-Card. The identification and configuration step is required to allow graceful rejection of none S-Card's since this is a PCMCIA interface. CableCARD 2.0 supports multiple MPEG2 transport streams, i.e. multiple tuners. A unique card detect features allow the host to identify the card as an M-Card before power is supplied to the card. Because of this, the card does not have to support the PCMCIA interface. The M-Card has the same physical form-factor as the S-Card but a significantly different electrical interface. The change from S-Card to M-Card is much more than a simple firmware change. Check out http://www.opencable.com/ for more details and other related information.