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PC-Based Digital Cable Decoder Hack?
musicbadger asks: "Hey,
I just got one of the ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon cards and it is pretty
good. It has a 125 cable-ready tuner on the back. I have an IRMAN which allows me to change channels with a regular remote. The AIW allows me to record shows, as well as pause/rewind live TV. But it only tunes in the basic non-premium channels. Shouldn't there be a way to use the same decoder algorithms used in the hacked cable boxes to decode premium channels using the computer's CPU? Of course, I would still pay for the premium channels, this is just a way to allow me to "time-shift" them using my VCR of choice." I think it's high time that decoder boxes had an external input to allow it to be "slaved" to another device. This way, such hacks would be unneeded. What say you? If such devices do already exist, where can they be found?
Project seems to be on the back burner, it was written during the 2.2.13 days, and includes a mod of the xawtv package, and only seems to work for North Amercian cable. FORTYoz you still out there? Anything you want to add?
well, fsck works for bttv type cards, not All in wonders so that's out of the question.
It's pretty simple to decode regular analog scrambled channels. One just has to search for the 20 shade bar and adjust the picture based on that.
Digital cables a whole nother mess. Digital cable is actually MPEG encoded. It uses a totally different frequency too so the normal tuners can't access these channels. I imagine that the cable company finally wised up and employes some form of encryption for the pay per view channels.
If each box has a private key, then the cable company can just encrypt the stream with access for only the cable boxes that have order it.
The truth is I am pretty sure they didn't do it this way but I'm sure it's something to that effect.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));