Shuttle’s Media Center XPC prototype has enough going on in its own right—it’s running on the new Alviso chipset, and has some nice touches like a removable hard drive bay—but to be honest what we really care about is the fact that it’s designed to run on the next version of Windows XP Media Center Edition (rather than the new one which just came out). Obviously a lot could change between now and the third quarter of this year when Windows XP Media Center 2006 is due out, but according to AndandTech the next version of the software is definitely going to add support for CableCard, which means you’ll be able to plug digital cable directly into the box and natively record HDTV programming. Windows Media Center XP 2005 did add support for HDTV tuner cards, but they’re only able to record over the air HDTV broadcasts.
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