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Samsung @ CEDIA - Cable Card 2.0 HDTV receiver -- SMT-H3050

by Matt Burns posted Sep 15th 2006 at 7:39AM

Coming to a cable provider near you -- maybe. The SMT-H3050 from Samsung is set-top box that is embedded with DOCCSIS 2.0 Cable Card and OCAP support for full interactivity. The box can output the video via S-Vid or HDMI and audio through an optical or dig-coax cable. There isn't a price for it yet, as the Samsung staffers don't know if this product is going to hit the retail markets yet, but they are pitching the unit to service providers. It would make sence that a person would buy this product, as this is the first box to allow a user to get all the goodies from their cable company (i.e. program guide, VOD, pay-per-view) without leasing their cable companie's equipment. Why wouldn't Samsung want to sell this item? We are sure some of you would love to kick your cable box to the road. Right?

Pics of cable card support after the link

Continue reading Samsung @ CEDIA - Cable Card 2.0 HDTV receiver -- SMT-H3050

Unofficial HD DVD 2.0 firmware surfaces online

by Matt Burns posted Aug 23rd 2006 at 11:59AM

WARNING: this is not the official Toshiba HD DVD 2.0 firmware and HDBeat is not responsible if you download this file and it messes up your precious HD DVD player. The firmware does appear to work however as a few users over at AVS Forum have reported success in now selecting the Dolby TrueHD soundtracks. Unfortunately, those same users are still reporting that they haven't seen an improvement in the picture quality relating to the deep black "blue-crush" issue. User William does point out that TrueHD support isn't the only upgrade with this new firmware as DTS-HD Master is now enabled along with 1080p 24/48/60Hz support, triple layer support and a different or more detailed menu tree is now available - we wish. No 1080p just yet and DTS-HD could be there but there isn't any titles that take advantage of it so there is no way to test it. Keep in mind we are not implying that you should upgrade to this firmware but some people are reporting success by doing so, but if it were our HD DVD player, we would wait till the official firmware update is released.

[Thanks, Rou]

Update 1: Made our sarcasm a bit more thick.

Where have all the cable cards gone?

by Matt Burns posted May 3rd 2006 at 11:40AM

Cable cards. Where have they gone? Have you noticed that they are no longer in many of the new HDTVs. Check this out: Panasonic's new PX60U series doesn't have 'em. Samsungs new DLPs and LCDs don't. JVC dosn't have the Card on their plasmas. We can keep going here. HPs plasmas and LGs plasmas. None of these have Cable Card support.

So why is this? Are manufactures waiting till Cable Card 2.0 comes out. Or is that they found out that many people are not using this option. We are sorry 'cause we don't know but we hope that it is the former of the two. Cable Card 2.0 is going to change a lot of things. It will bring all of the benifits and features of a cable box, like on-screen guides and on-demand, to the cable card. The current implimentation gives consumers the same stations as a cable box but not the same features. We want our features!




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