Vista Media Center CableCard Solution is Ugly

One of the big draws for Vista Media Center is the ability to record and watch high definition TV from the major service providers. However, in order to get the big providers to sign up, Microsoft had to agree to some heavy digital rights management protection which makes it so you can't add your own HDTV tuner card that will work with Vista. You have to buy a certified PC that has gone through specific testing from an OEM vendor like Dell. PVRWire breaks it down for us:

The video will be decrypted from cable and then re-encrypted in the tuner with Microsoft DRM. The video will then travel through a USB port to the media center, even if the Tuner is an internal PCI card.

So you will have an external device that holds the digital TV tuner that connects to your PC via USB. You can watch this Microsoft on10 video to see how big it is. This is one ugly solution; I can only hope that eventually you will be able to buy a PC that has the tuner integrated. I know for me this will drive me to just buy my HD content from the Xbox Windows Live marketplace for the TV shows I want to watch.