Hasta La Gadget!

It’s easy to get HD content on your home theater PC, but as soon as the content becomes encrypted–which increasingly more and more of it is–you’ll need a CableCard-based PC. And CableCards only come in new PCs. In other words, to get HBO on your PC you’ll need to buy a new PC. Thank god for DanITMan, who’s devised a way to hack the BIOS on your PC to make it CableCard-compliant, letting you add one of the tuners to your current PC. The technique ain’t easy, however, so we point you to EngadgetHD’s Ben Drawbaugh. Drawbaugh, who also wrote pretty much the definitive guide to downloading and importing HD into Windows Media Center, just posted a great story on how to install a CableCARD tuner in your DIY Media Center.

Drawbaugh notes, “This doesn’t really require any hacking, or anything illegal for that matter–we’re not lawyers–but it isn’t cheap. The internal version of the ATI Digital Cable Tuner pictured above can be found new on eBay for about $195, or new from PC vendors like Cannon PC for just under $300.” In my eyes, replacing your PC’s BIOS with something else to add a verboten feature is the definition of hacking, but I’m not one to quibble. If you have an HTPC and you feel up to the challenge, follow his step by step guide and let us know whether you’re successful.