When i was a kid, my dad had a Mac with the A/V PAL-SECAM cards. Hooked up a make-shift copper wire antenna and wrote a decoder with the free codewarrior cd folks gave me at Paris' Mac convention (we were 12 and crazy I guess). Good opportunity to learn powerplant and c/c++.
I ended up brute forcing most of it as I did not really understand what I was doing, but it turns out, with enough time, you get things going.
Wish the pages were still up, I lost that software long ago, and I'm sure my code was garbage (not that its much better today, but at least I can blame Claude..) and fun to read.
If you had enough motivation, you could learn to decode the picture by squinting, and understand the audio by enough exposure. That came very handy to many a teenager on late Saturday evenings.
Yeah, that's the Nagravision that the article mentions at the end.
There were programs that could use a TV capture card and decode it in real time on a 486DX2. They worked pretty well (I felt ok using it because we already had Canal+ but it was on the living room TV and my computer was on the opposite side of the house.)
My father was in electronics and schematics of pirate decoders were being passed around between friends/colleagues (this was before the web!) He got the schematics and built one.
Later in the 90's, when TV cards became cheap enough I got one for my computer then there were software to decode the signal.
> Piracy became rampant. Asking for "TBA 970" delay chips in electronic stores prompted employees to offer the full list required to build a "decodeur pirate". The encryption system was updated to Nagravision encryption in 1992 and Discret 11 was retired by 1995.
We had one in the house. Very cheap and easy to get from north africa. Upgraded encryption was quickly matched with upgraded piracy. Then canalsat came along and you needed a memory card to keep your pirating hardware up to date, but it was still ok.
Now I don't watch TV, and DRM in browser doesn't seem to have been broken the same way.
But it doesn't matter because things like stremio give you the catalogs of all streaming services for free.
Didn't operate for long? 1984-1995 - its long enough. Still remember seeing those scrambled programs in France.
At the time in UK, lets say 87-92, the concept of paid tv over the air was incredible. Satellite existed, but wasn't very prevalent.
I ended up brute forcing most of it as I did not really understand what I was doing, but it turns out, with enough time, you get things going.
Wish the pages were still up, I lost that software long ago, and I'm sure my code was garbage (not that its much better today, but at least I can blame Claude..) and fun to read.
The 90's were fun.
Still supposedly, the hardest part was finding the strainer in the kitchen without waking everyone in the house.
And the saddest part was discovering that it didn't work.
GP is referring to Canal+ who'd play that one weekly porn movie on saturday evening.
Us kids from the eighties could watch like 30 seconds unencrypted, than the scrambling would start.
We'd still watch the movie ; )
I'm guessing it's a latter version?
There were programs that could use a TV capture card and decode it in real time on a 486DX2. They worked pretty well (I felt ok using it because we already had Canal+ but it was on the living room TV and my computer was on the opposite side of the house.)
Later in the 90's, when TV cards became cheap enough I got one for my computer then there were software to decode the signal.
https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/reports/1995-11.pdf
Good ol' civil disobedience. Love it.
We had one in the house. Very cheap and easy to get from north africa. Upgraded encryption was quickly matched with upgraded piracy. Then canalsat came along and you needed a memory card to keep your pirating hardware up to date, but it was still ok.
Now I don't watch TV, and DRM in browser doesn't seem to have been broken the same way.
But it doesn't matter because things like stremio give you the catalogs of all streaming services for free.
Seems like piracy never dies.