[popper]

Originally Posted by jpa

I have just spoken to Customer Services at NTL an I asked as a sideline question 'when was the HDTV STB coming out' and was told it is COMING IN JUNE talk about surprised. Then I was told that the customer services staff had been on a training course last month!!!!!!!!!!!!
I will believe it when I see it,as i am very used to NTL false promises.

if its coming in june, then that means its already in production and hence the spec has been finalised.

if the above is true, did NTL set the spec as they can do, and indeed as the UKs biggest cable company it would make long term finantial sense to spec the box to be long term field/base engineer expandable from their POV.

or, did they just take something like that reference design i posted about above, with the relevent options (read cheapest base options) required to work on NTL network in the short term ?, did they for instance spec a standard, (cheap) 3d gfx chip XGI V3XT 2D and 3D graphics support
http://www.xgitech.com/products/products_2.asp?P=22
Built in with latest 3D processing engines with HDTV output upto 720p/1080i, Volari V3XE has been broadly used in multimedia applications with various kind of processors such as RISC, ARM and the standard x86 CPU.

or just go the whole way and spec an ati X1300/1600 chip for far longer longevity, keeping in mind that even mobil phones have had 2D/3D and sprites hardware assisted chips for a very long time, and hence can far exceed any current NTL STB for playing the odd games or two, plus one of the above could potentially, vastly improve the liberate middleware NTL and C&W before them insist on using for their gfx and html/java return path/control.

i would also advise NTL to spec a good FPGA as standard and hence open their options to adding vast amounts of possibilitys, licencing old amiga/atari etc games and running them off an emulator that could sit in the FPGA chip for instance.