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Comment by Neil44 | Hacker News Reader

I remember these from the 90's, we knew someone who dealt them. There was a little card/PCB type hybrid thing and every now and then they'd change something about the encryption and you'd have to go back and get the card re flashed. Eventually they got killed off altogether iirc.

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The 'CableCard' system where I lived was pretty big during the TiVO era before cable companies started providing their own DVR systems.

You had to get 2 cards one for each tuner card in the TiVO and they would constantly fail and had endless issues. I was a Cablevision (a New York cable company) technician at the time.

M cards seem reasonably reliable. I've had them in some 4 and 6 tuner Tivos for several years now.

I had a TiVo HD with an M-Card on Armstrong Cable from 2008 through when I got rid of cable altogether. I don't recall ever having any issues with it, so if I did they weren't all that memorable. Certainly nothing like the piece of shit Motorola box they gave me to start.

The parts that sucked about CableCard mostly sucked because a lot of cable companies wanted them to suck, but the suckage was not mandatory.

That's also what I'd read. For a while I used a Hauppauge PCI card to get legit/paid cable into my HTPC. It actually still works for OTA digital TV but back then it was a godsend.

Even the built-in Windows Media Center gave me a better interface and tons of storage versus the junky old cable boxes for rent, but then they used confusion over the switch to broadcast digital to stop providing Clear QAM channels and move everyone over to digital encrypted cable boxes.

For a while I really wanted to buy one of those fancy Ceton cards that took a CableCard like a TiVo, but between the cost of the tuner card and the horror stories I read about getting $CableCo to support anything but a TiVo I just said screw it and stopped buying cable at all.

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