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Spotlight: Niveus Media Center PCs
Niveus was demonstrating their Rainer edition Media Center at CES Unveiled. Running Windows Vista, the unit had TV tuners capable of PVR functionally for both SD and over-the-air HDTV (antenna and good reception required for OTA HDTV). The unit also sported an HD-DVD drive to watch HD-DVDs in 1080P over HDMI or VGA. Other features included SPDIF out for audio (supporting up to 7.1), two USB ports and a Firewire port, FM audio input and RS-232 and IR Blaster ports to control other devices from the unit. It's a very impressive unit, however the price is steep, starting at $3500 for a base model and going up from there. The unit had some elaborate heatsinks on the sides, which you wouldn't see if you put the device in your home theater setup, and serve the purpose of making sure the unit is whisper quiet.       Niveus was also debuting a new add on unit which has dual CableCard slots for tuning and recording Digital Cable and HDTV. The unit uses Windows Vista's support for OCUR (open cable unidirection receiver) to tune and record (if allowed - your mileage may vary when it comes to premium channels like HBO and Showtime) digital cable and HDTV that you wouldn't otherwise be able to record with current analog tuners. One of the features mentioned was that when Vista allows more than two OCUR units in the system, the extra units can be daisy chained together to allow for more than two channels to be recorded at the same time. The only downside to the unit is that CableCards are only be supported by the cable industry halfheartedly. They currently don't support PPV or On-Demand features (because they're unidirectional - from the cable company to your set top box), and the cable companies, in an attempt to more efficiently use their network bandwidth, have switched lesser watched channels to a mechanism called Switched Digital Video (SDV). This means that the channel is only being sent when a STB requests that channel, and because CableCard devices cant send out messages (only receive), devices built around CableCards can't receive channels that are setup in a SDV format. This downside isn't limited to Niveus however - the Series 3 TiVo and all other similar CableCard devices have this problem too. Until the Consumer Electronics industry receives support from the cable companies, we're at their whim. If you enjoyed this article, make sure to check out the rest of our extensive CES Coverage. You can help support us by Digging this article. 
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