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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));
Now, would you *really* pay for the channels, or was that just the way to get the question posted? Ohh that reminds me, I need to pay for my copies of Windows...Ohh well I paid for Windows 3.1, I'll just keep using these that I have.
The flamebait out of the way, its an interesting idea. How does the TiVo work? Does it do the actual decoding, or does it just slave to your decoder box? I'd imagine if you had a hacked decoder, you could just connect the video-out coax cable to the video-in coax port on your ATI card, and go like that - but that implies you actually have a hacked decoder.
Try SourceForge. There's a lot of good stuff there.
JKoebel
TiVo just sits between the Cable Box and your TV (or whatever your setup). It doesn't do any decoding of cable channels what so ever.
Much like an ISP would hand you an IP, your digital box is addressable. When you change channels on a digital system, your box tells the headend "give me this channel" so it's not like you can just decode the stream coming down the pipe, digital is a 2 way deal. Many if not most cable systems are working twords all digital and will drop the analog part of the frequency as soon as they can (I think FCC is making them phase analog out slowly for some reason but I may be wrong on that).
One solution is to use some Infared controller on your pc to make the digital box do it's thing from the PC.
to see how this all works, go to www.cablemodem.com the cablelabs website. cable labs does DOCSIS certification on equipment, DOCSIS is the Protocol of cable networks and it supports Video, Data(internet) and Telephony (your phone service. if you could design a PCI card that could talk docsis, you could fake like your pc was the digital box, but I'd rather hack an IR to control the digital box.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
For those of us who are already paying for the service, are there any reasonable options? Is it possible to have a second cable box for digital cable?
(Slave mode or something.)
Holdeth not thy breath.
There aren't enough tech-savvy subcribers to create the demand to make mass-production of the necessary hardware feasible. Telling the local cable company that you want to kludge together their hardware and some do-it-yourself stuff of yours will not be met with enthusiasm.
If you want to descramble more than one premium channel at a time, you have to rent a separate box from them. If you want remote control over the process, you have to rent a remote control from them. If you don't subscribe to premium channels and have an older TV or VCR that only tunes up to cable channel 36, you'll find that the extra unscrambled channels that you're paying for (CNN, Nickelodeon, etc.) will get shifted up above 36 and the premium channels shifted down so that you have to rent a converter box and remote control from them to get what you're already paying for.
Beginning to see a trend yet?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.