Get Rid of that Stinkin Cable Box???

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CableCARD

Apparently this device can unscramble digital cable without the use of the cable company's box. Also, as of July 2007, this is supposed to be a common thing because of a law passed that says third party unscramblers may be used.

So... Will this let me not use a cable box and connect directly to a HTPC??

You stil lwill not get PPV or ondemand features, and comcast stil lcharges you a box rental fee for renting the cable card.

but yah basically.

"Two proposals exist for enhancing the CableCARD standard. Both are designed to add support for two-way features whose operation details the CE and cable company representatives could not agree on in time for inclusion in the CableCARD 1.0 specification. These two-way features include ordering Pay-per-view via remote, Video On Demand, advanced electronic programming guide information, and Switched Video services. These features are not supported by CableCARD 1.0, and so are not available with current CableCARD-enabled products."

But it seems they're hope...Eventually.

Yah eventually.. right now you can rent just the card from comcast... but its v1, with no extra features

So is it possible to jam one of these in a linux HTPC?

according to a couple of the comcast techs i recently spoke w/ on this subject comcast uses the SA cards and they pretty much said that 1 in 10 actually works and not so well (yes i cleaned up the language ... i think SSS will agree as to SA's products in general and the techs language as well ... lol) and advised me to go w/ the motorola cards if i wanted to persue that approach ... yes comcast still charges the "box" fee tho

cableCARD is currently only available to OEM pc builders right now. You cannot go out and buy a cableCARD ready tuner as of now.