PC-Based Digital Cable Decoder Hack? 26
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?
fsck tv (Score:2, Informative)
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?
Re:fsck tv (Score:1)
Err, sorry that is for analog cable only decoding...
not digital, it's too early in the morning to be posting...
Not really possible... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Not really possible... (Score:1)
begin searching the first line for a 20 shade difference (color changes but it will always be about 20 shades lighter where that little bar is). Once you find that on the first line, it is reasonable to assume that on the next line, that same bar should be about that same position (there is a slight variance, but not much usually).
Use this as a basis to copy the data in to the video overlay area. The real question I guess is it possible to put the AIW cards in something other than overlay mode. You'll never succeed if you try to just go through normal displays to display the data. You'll need an overlay area. Since the AIW drivers are mostly in usermode implement through X, this means some X hacking (not very fun...).
The video capture stuff is relatively new and I haven't followed the project in quite some time but email me if you actually get anywhere on it...
Re:Not really possible... (Score:1)
The box I have hasn't been fully exploited however, it has usb support which seems to have no use with the software installed. It does have some kind of proprietary removable media bay, but I haven't investigated this throughly yet.
Digital Cable (Score:1)
Pay? (Score:2)
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
Re:TiVo (Score:2)
Re:TiVo (Score:1)
Re:Pay? (Score:1)
If you wanted to tape a pay-tv show, you had to daisy chain your cable box to the VCR, and then to the TV, setting both devices to channel 3 or 4 and only using the cable box' integrated tuner. By writing a software-based decoder, you get to watch any channel, whether you've signed up for it or not, without needing to cascade your decoder into the PC's tv-tuner. It results in slightly better image quality and allows you to retain use of your pc's channel tuning abilities, so you can do time-shifting across channels.
Effectively, for the TiVo to work with premium channels, it would need to decode the signals itself, otherwise it would be restricted to recording only the channel that is active on the cable box.
Re:Pay? (Score:1)
Digital cable is much the same, but more sophisticated. A much more advanced encryption algorthm is used and a public/private key system is used to control authentication.
Your digital cable box cannot decode channels it's not allow to see. You will also have a much harder time trying to brute force decrypt the channels.
I think your also confused about how tuners work. TiVos, cable boxes, and PC cards all have a single tuner (most of the time). The tuner can extract ONE channel from a cable stream. A software decoder could not decode one channel and let you watch another one.
Software decoders work reasonable well for analog cable systems but are just like normal descramblers. They do not work (and probably will _never_ work real-time) for digital cable.
Re:Pay? (Score:1)
would have to be "adressable" (Score:2)
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.
Re:would have to be "adressable" (Score:1)
The FCC has no interest in phasing out analogy but does have interest in standardizing ATSC.
Your box doesn't request a channel, but rather a frequency range which carries multiple channels. It's actually, a bit more sophisticated than that though...
Re:would have to be "adressable" (Score:1)
I think they're referring to the mandatory HDTV shift in 2005, but I'm not sure... can someone explain the difference between HDTV, digital cable, and analog cable, I think I know but I'm probably wrong.
Extra Cable Box (Score:2)
(Slave mode or something.)
Re:Extra Cable Box (Score:1)
-Henry
I wish you luck, but.... (Score:2)
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?
Re:I wish you luck, but.... (Score:1)
Re:I wish you luck, but.... (Score:2)
Oh and also, if they're going to require you to use their external tuner, they could at least provide a decent way of getting the signal to the TV. It sucks that it has to be sent through another tuner again.
Re:I wish you luck, but.... (Score:1)
Alot of the newer equipment has alot of digital throughputs that avoid the whole tuner mess. Right now I go RF from my digital cable to the VCR, but then totally digital connections from there on.
I have one of the older digital cable boxes but I hear the newer ones have digital outputs too.
They also have the standard control inputs too so they should theoritically work with a TiVo like device.
What I still want is a huge splitter that divides all the channels into individual feeds that I can then stream to whatever TV I want.
Re:I wish you luck, but.... (Score:2)
Why bother. (Score:1)
The funny thing is, I had intended to go DSS eventually, but the longer I go without all the extra channels the less I miss them. Now I have more time for constructive activity and self-improvement, such as reading Slashdot and playing Diablo. Is it really worth the effort to hack up a PC to emulate a cable box to get scrambled channels that for the most part suck anyway? But yeah, it does have a high cool factor; that in itself is justification enough I suppose.