DailyTech - Update: AMD OCUR CableCard Bug Delays Media Center Shipments

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Hardware Update: AMD OCUR CableCard Bug Delays Media Center Shipments
Kristopher Kubicki (Blog) - April 5, 2007 10:10 AM

15 comment(s) - last by Sahrin.. on May 4 at 10:54 AM

The CableCard-ready TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner

ATI's newest TV tuner bug forces system manufacturers to delay Media Center PCs

AMD's newest CableCard endeavor may have hit a snag. Systems manufactured with the ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner have a bug that has halted shipments of the new PCs.

ATI engineers claim the bug is very minor. "The bug occurs when the TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner attempts to sync signal on an all-digital tuner," said one AMD Taiwan engineer.

The bug seems to affect those who have TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuners with specific all-digital providers. With the current firmware, users will get a "no signal error" after inserting the CableCard.

"[We] will send out firmwares to fix the sync problem in the next week," added the engineer. Firmware upgrades will be made available to any customers who already have tuners. In the interim, ATI has stopped shipment on new batches of the tuners until it can ship cards with the newest updates.

"The firmware updates have essentially delayed our [system] shipments by two weeks," stated a North American system manufacturer.

Other system builders state that the bug can easily be fixed by rebooting the tuner. Velocity Micro, who unveiled the first CableCard-ready PCs in North America, declined to comment about the bug.

This is not the first time ATI has run into bug problems at launch. A crippling error forced all TV Wonder 650 Tuners off store shelves until proper firmwares could fix QAM sync errors. Today, however, the TV Wonder 650 is one of the most reliable and robust tuners on the market.

Update 04/05/07: AMD Multimedia product manager Shane Parfitt adds the following:

With one specific CableCard from Scientific Atlanta Networks, the digital cable signal is lost if the ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner switches to analog reception and then back again. It’s important to note that it's just this one card – the ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner is compatible with all the other currently available cards, such as those from Motorola (which has over half the market) and even others from Scientific Atlanta Networks. However, we’ve been able to find a work around for it in our hardware, through a firmware update, and we anticipate that this will be with our customers by the end of April. The delay is mostly due to the certification process CableLabs requires for this change.