OCUR and non OEM machine BIOS solution
With some more digging, I have located two utilities, One will run a check to see if your system BIOS has OCUR enabled. The other will basically embed a hitfix into your boot loader that "Injects" the OCUR block into memory after the BIOS is read and stored in RAM. This doesn't alter your bios at all it's a post boot software solution that tricks your OS into believing that your PC is OCUR compliant.
So what is this mysteriouse OCUR thing anyway?
From what i can tell, it's nothing more than a little bit of data that simply put, identifies your machine as one that is certified by CableLabs to be Digital Cable compliant. Your probably asking, what makes a computer digital cable certified? the simple answer is, nothing. The PC OEM's don't like Do-it-yourself'ers. We make far better machines cheaper than they can sell them. Have you ever opened up a Dell and seen the cheep shit they stuff inside? anyway, thats another rant. What the OEMs did was have a little sit down with M$ and CableLabs to devise a grand scheme to keep DIY crowd out of the Media Center/HTPC cookie jar. when I say cookie jar a say it in the "Street Kings" sense of the term. Watch the movie, you'll understand.
Those of you who think this is the cable companies trying to keep to tight a lid on DRM, thus making the whole process too daunting for us DIY folks, you would also be correct. Their motivation is also money, but not in a sense that they want to earn, but to keep from losing it to media theft. Don't worry Big Cable, MPAA and RIAA! people will still break down your mediocre methods of copy protection.
so for those that are planning to take advantage of a CableCARD Digital cable tuner, the folks over at TheGreenButton have put together a nice little guide to help you. here is the link:
Use this to see if your BIOS is OCUR enabled...
http://www.dougknox.com/xpmce/utils/ocurbioscheck.zip
If your Bios is not OCUR enables download this hot fix...
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/t/73065.aspx
If you are a vista user, follow the instructions for vista there is nothing to note, if you are using Windows 7 take note of a few things they forget to mention:
1) run mkldr.cmd to create the loader, don't know why they omitted this
2) If you upgraded from vista to 7, you can skip the part about assigning a drive letter to the "System reserved patition, you don't have one.
3) Run your "command prompt" as administrator, otherwise you will get an access denied message and the OSFRLoader will not install correctly.
After restarting your machine, run the BIOS check again, you should get a response saying that your bios is now OCUR compliant. remember, nothing physically changed in your bios, so you can flash it every time a new revision is released without worry.
Now, what about the Microsoft Digital Cable PID? I have that covered as well, follow this link:
DIY'ers successfully build their own CableCARD equipped HTPC
Personally, I'm waiting for the Ceton Card that will be 6 tuners in one card needing only one CableCARD to all. Check it out before dropping any money on a single ATI tuner when you could get a single card with 6;
Ceton Corp announces multi-stream CableCARD tuner for Windows Media Center