griff1013
join:2002-01-10
Virginia Beach, VA
| Re: Wow. The "review" was an observation by Dave who writes for dslprime.com. I believe it was at some tech show or something. MSFT and CMCSA were not cooperating with the demonstration at all. They were just using a CMCSA HDTV feed as a comparison to the MSFT codec. One of the other posters mentioned later in the thread the exact specifics of the compression and that it is indeed lower in quality. The compression will require a significant amount of horsepower in top of your TV. It will clearly not be an Intel chip, but a MIPS processor from Broadcam probably designed specifically for compression. Will be able to run much slower MHz to keep the heat down and MTBF up.
MSFT is the King of Vaporware and I will have to see it to believe it. I am not sure that something as poorly coded and bloated as Windows will translate well to the set-top experience. In order to make it work like they have talked about, the "computer" would have to be very powerful. That would drive up the cost of the set-top for the cable cos far about the $200 or so they pay MOT and SFA for them. But MSFT has billions to burn and will probably so an X-box type deal with the cable cos - sell the hardware at a significant loss just to make the sale and hope to make it back on the software side. Cable cos also hate service calls as the cost so much. I can't imagine them wanting to get into the service business of a massive MSFT settop box that will allow folks to add additional programs to it. Billions of service calls on that. |
