Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s

kangs 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

The 90's were fun.

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athrow 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In Poland Canal+ was encrypted like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z83bIGiRVy4

I'm guessing it's a latter version?

	▲	jtarrio 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.)

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charles_f an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	whynotmaybe 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Or supposedly you could shake a strainer in front of your eyes. 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.

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amiga386 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interesting! Over in the UK we had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCrypt

https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/reports/1995-11.pdf

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eloisant 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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kotaKat 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Asking for "TBA 970" delay chips in electronic stores prompted employees to offer the full list required to build a "decodeur pirate"

Good ol' civil disobedience. Love it.

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dtagames 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

An ancient Easter egg is revealed at the end of this interesting article. The "all free" code was `1337` or "leet" in leet!

	▲	tclancy 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not quite. The T is silent.

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breakingcups 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[2020]