So I’ve upgraded my TV to a new Samsung HDTV and along with it have gotten a digital cable box for HDTV from Comcast. The cable box, a Motorola DCT6200 has all the typical features I’ve seen in cable boxes thus far… Plus a few strange ones. One of the ones I’ve never seen before is a Smart Card slot. From what I’ve briefly been exposed to, smart cards are all the rage over in the UK yet are slow to the US, but seem to be used for virtually everything from buying stuff to identification.
The Motorola site says only the Smart Card interface port will later be used for ecommerce, and seemingly nothing else… Why does my cable box need a slot for one? Will I be able to buy things through it with a conventional credit card or does it only read smart cards, if that’s even what Motorola means by e-commerce… ?
While we’re at it, why the heck does it also have USB and ethernet ports? Ethernet ports I can understand for I believe it can act as a cable modem, but USB ports?
Quite a few cable modems have USB and Ethernet ports because USB connectivity is perceived as easier for inexperienced home users and we’re still not at quite at the point where every home PC includes an ethernet adaptor as standard, whereas USB has been a standard feature for some years. I’m pretty sure that the cable modem I’m using at home actually has a USB>ethernet adaptor inside it, as my system detected the cable modem and an RTL8139 Network Adaptor.
No idea about the smartcard thing - I’d have guessed that it would have been for some kind of Pay-Per-View or subscription card, but maybe they are intending to implement some kind of electronic wallet idea.
webtvs (now msntv) used to have a smart card slot. The manual said it for some kind online financial stuff or something. If you put a credit card in it the webtv gave you en error.
ah the joys of trying things just becouse they fit in the socket.
When I had digital cable boxes with Cablevision, the smart card was used to identity you as a customer. My understanding was instead of having the box addressable (as it was in the days of analog boxes), now the card is addressable; this way, if you swap boxes, they don’t need to enter a new address into the system. Additionally, in the future when TVs start having digital cable decoders built in, you would just insert your smart card into your TV so your cable company can authorize it to receive the channels you pay for.
I also just bought a Samsung (HCN437W) and love it when watching high quality signals (i.e. DVD), SD broadcast over my Comcast analog cable basically sucks though. I’m considering moving to digital cable (though HD isn’t available in my area yet ). Do you find that the regular (non-HD) digital broadcast is substantially superior to analog in terms of picture quality?
If the card slot is proudly and openly out there on the front, it’s probably a yet-unused feature for shopping or similar. If it’s hidden away on the back, behind a panel or otherwise inconspicuous, it’s probably an unused feature for controlling access.
My satellite receivers have had occupied smart card slots for the past five years. The cards are behind drop-down panels, and are essential to the box. Take it out and the box blanks out and puts up an error message telling you to put the card back in. If nothing else, it’s an easy method for parental lockout. No messing with programming times or permitted channels - just disable the whole thing.
And, unlike the card-is-addressible-and-not-the-cable-box scheme above, these cards are unique to each box, and will not work elsewhere. This is part of why there’s not been a hacking community bent on stealing Dish Network signals like there has been for DirecTV.
There used to be a huge market for “cracked” or “open” cards for DirecTV receivers as they’d work in any DirecTV box. The holder of one of these cards was a popular guest at parties - just pop the special card into the host’s system and the pay-per-view or blacked-out football game magically appears for free.
Speaking for myself of course, I have the same model cable box thru Comcast conected to my Hitatchi HDTV. The first 76 channels are analog and look like crap. The Digital stations look a lot better comparatively, but still grainy thanks to the size of the screen I guess. The HD stations are gorgeous though.
My experiences are similar to Max Carnage’s… The normal analog channels look pretty bad, worse than I remember with normal TV (damn HDTV’s higher resolution…) but the digital channels are better, with the HDTV stations of course being incredible.
The cable box comes with all the normal component outputs, along with SPDIF and optical SPDIF, IR, s-video, and a few other outputs. You can apparantly even have a firewire port that’s optional. A diagram of the back of the box detailing all the outputs can be found here: http://broadband.motorola.com/hdtv/02UsefulGuide.pdf
). Do you find that the regular (non-HD) digital broadcast is substantially superior to analog in terms of picture quality?