I am thinking of buying a new Dell XPS 420 with dual ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable tuners to stream TV wirelessly to 2 TVs in the house.

I have a PS3 but no XBOX 360 or Linksys certified Media Center Extenders. Does anyone know if I can view the digital cable programming wirelessly via the PS3 being decoded by the OCUR cable tuners in the PC? I know I can grab other media from the computer through the PS3 but I want to watch HBOHD TV realtime.

I was willing to get a XBOX 360 until I heard you have to have a LIVE subscription in order to make the Netflix instant download service work. I am cheap so I was not happy to hear that.

Any advice or shared experiences would be helpful.

No, you need a media center extender for that.

The PS3 would be able to connect to the pc and share music and other media, but not anything recorded by the cablecards due to DRM.

Please forgive my ignorance, but do the cablecards "record" the information? I thought the ATI tuners simply decoded the info from the cable cards supplied by my local cable company. Shouldn't the decoded info be available on the PC or are the ATI tuners aligned with Microsoft and only work through the Media Center? Thanks!

Short answer

The cablecard tuners decode and wrap the recordings in drm only Media Center and it's extenders can decode.

So yes they are aligned with microsoft/media center.

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Dell xps420 w/ dual ATI cable cards
Hdhomerun for QAM
Panasonic 50" Plasma fed by xbox 360
Panasonic 42" plama fed by xbox 360
3TB in storage and counting

Thank you all.