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sat reciever

joe81 - May 16, 2005

		joe81	May 16, 2005
		just wondering if there would be a way to use my old sat receiver as a digital cable receiver. we have digital cable at my house and my parents only have one receiver for it so i'm looking for a way to turn my old direct tv receiver into a digi cable receiver. If anyone has any ideas feel free to share.

		ExCyber	May 16, 2005
		Digital pay TV in the US is pretty much all proprietary, so your chances of "converting" a unit are close to zilch. This could change for cable systems in the next decade or so, but for now the situation kind of sucks.

		joe81	May 16, 2005
		i thought maybe there might be a way to flash the box with a different bios or something where it would just pick up on the cable signal

		lordofduct	May 16, 2005
		No you can't... See the digital cable just like the satelite you receive is sent digitally and encrypted so that way no one can steal it. The box is basically a decrypter and decoder. The decoding is ok as long as both services use the same format (usually services all use MPEG2) the downside is the encryption. You could theoretically "mod" it to decrypt a new signal if you knew the encryption code. But well if you knew that you wouldn't be paying for tv! I know I wouldnt! Why would you want to do this anyway? Most digital cable companies give you the box when you sign up for it.

		lordofduct	May 16, 2005
		If you have a non proprietary box by some 3rd party company though you could use that with "magic cards". But magic cards are expensive and highly illegal and a pain in the ass just to use. Nevermind locating a store to buy one that is trustworthy and affordable. Then on top of it all, you usually can't find the code for american cable companies. They are mostly all european satellite companies that the codes are out there for.

		VertigoXX	May 16, 2005
		Yeah, but the cable companies also CHARGE you for each additional box. We were finaly forced to upgrade to digital earlier this year. Sure, the cost of the initial deal isn't any more, but consider that we have four boxes, and it goes up an extra $21. We ended up dropping Showtime, The Movie Channel, and Cinemax to recoup the difference. Only premium channels we get now are the five HBO's. And that's only for The Sopranos, The Wire, etc. I'm thinking about dropping that, too, and just downloading the HBO shows I want to see. $124 a month for cable is f'ing rediculous. If I want to watch a movie, I watch a DVD or VHS. Most of my TV watching is network or basic cable anyway. Joe's right on track, if I could pick up cheap DTV recievers at a thrift store and modify them to recieve my digital cable, I'd go for it. If I didn't have to rent three extra boxes a month, that'd be money saved.

		joe81	May 16, 2005
		ya vertigo knows what i'm talking about lol i mean i figure the signal is going to my house already so the whole encryption thing i woudln't really have to bypass just the whole receiver being able to get the info. right now all it does is ask me for a valid card constantly.

		lordofduct	May 16, 2005
		Joe, the decryption is done in the box its self, so it is a problem. If you have a cheap DTV receiver (like I said the 3rd party boxes) you can get magic cards and get it. Its just difficult and a one time really expensive fee... on top of being illegal. Or you need another card from your cable company. depending if you have the right box. tell me which box you have... is it 3rd party or 1st party. If its 1st party I need to know what company it is. If its 3rd party just call your cable company... seeing you already have a box it will be cheaper for the card. (maybe, if your company is nice, cause usually that monthly fee is rental fee of the box.)

		lordofduct	May 16, 2005
		It is still gonna cost more money a month because another box means more bandwidth usage... but as you own the box it aughta still be cheaper.

		joe81	May 16, 2005
		it's an rca receiver for the sat the real cable box we have i dont know what it is but it doesn't use a card at all. other than that all the other info it is in another room and i'm too tired to get it.

		lordofduct	May 16, 2005
		No card on your legite cable box means its proprietary and there really is no way but by ordering another box from your cable company. (to bad, see most receivers use the cards, the cards have the decryption code written to it for service. Sorry for your luck!) To everyone: You may want to complain about this. But technically this is good (although some companies exploit it for personal gain). The box being proprietary first allows it so people don't steal their cable and they don't have to jack prices. Second, every box is going to eat up bandwidth from their network. A tv show can have UP to 4.9 MB/s of data going while you are "viewing". That means if you have 3 boxes and your watching 3 different shows using the maximum amount of bandwidth allotted to them you are receiving an absurd amount of bandwidth which takes away from everyone else in your zone. This costs them money and complaints... so again a little fee, a cap on your access (most companies allow a max of 4 or 5 receivers per house depending square footage) and this problem is taken care of. Although these extreme cases are rare as the only tv shows that will use max bandwidth are shows like the superbowl or other specials. Its still a scenario needed to be avoided. Anyways your general show still uses about 1 MB/s (for those geeks out there yes its 19.??? mega BITS buttheads) just for the 480p... that still adds up. And what if you use the higher definitions on the channels that have it. (all standard digital tv uses at minimum 480p)

		Mask of Destiny	May 16, 2005
		Just a thought, but wouldn't it make more sense for them to just use multicast (i.e. one packet, many destinations) for all the non on-demand channels thus avoiding any problems with scaling up the number of boxes for those channels? In such a case it wouldn't cost them any more for multiple boxes (well that's not completely true, if they only had one box, they'd only need to broadcast one channel at a time).

		lordofduct	May 17, 2005
		They do... kinda. But what about the times when people are watching channels that can't use something similar to that. Say everyone in the house is all watching on-demand! This theoretical situations occur, maybe not all the time, but they have to be anticipated as they are random and you do not know when they will occur. They have to invent caps on it to control the situation while at the same time not piss people off. Would you rather pay more for another box or have your tv go out randomly cause everyone on the block has 8 boxes all watching different TV shows (which is logical as there are 300 channels offered). Or would you rather be forced to have to keep all the channels that are tuned in in a certain range of eachother. (i.e. if living room is on 100 then all other channels in the house can not be within so many channels of that... this would be because data is transferred through several different lines or "transponders" to relieve stress on other stations) No you wouldn't want that! would you? the 5 dollar fee is much more reasonable then spuratic service that may not work sometimes. Put up and deal and pray that fiber optics comes to your town soon! When that comes are TV viewing, internet access and telephones are going to reach what "2001 A Space Odyssey" described them as! Shit I remember my 14.4 kbps modem on an old Tandy 10mhz (guess of clock speed) and watching fuzzy bunny ear TV. We didn't even have cable where we lived! Sorry I sound like a loud mouth know it all dick... but you all may have learned something! I love learning!

		ExCyber	May 17, 2005
		The box being proprietary first allows it so people don't steal their cable and they don't have to jack prices. None of the receiver/decoder hardware has to be proprietary for this if there is a good encryption/authorization framework; only the inner workings of the CAM and the key authorization/exchange themselves would be proprietary (and of course could be arbitrarily changed by the cable company to make any hacking/cloning not worth the effort) - you could buy a receiver from any manufacturer and just plug in the appropriate card from your cable company. Work is being done on this but I don't think it's deployed yet, from the tiny bit I've heard it sounds like most systems are still the proprietary Motorola/GI and Scientific Atlanta stuff. And although there's DVB for satellite in Europe, Dish and DirecTV launched their systems before the standards were done so those are yet another pair of incompatible proprietary systems...

		Mask of Destiny	May 18, 2005
		Originally posted by lordofduct+Wed, 2005-05-18 @ 04:28 AM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(lordofduct @ Wed, 2005-05-18 @ 04:28 AM)</div><div class='quotemain'>Say everyone in the house is all watching on-demand! This theoretical situations occur, maybe not all the time, but they have to be anticipated as they are random and you do not know when they will occur.[/b] Most ondemand channels have a monthly fee or are pay-per-view which provides its own economic cap on the number of users. If they can't support the bandwidth needs of the number of on-demand users they should be raising their prices for on-demand subscriptions     Originally posted by lordofduct@ They have to invent caps on it to control the situation while at the same time not piss people off. Would you rather pay more for another box or have your tv go out randomly cause everyone on the block has 8 boxes all watching different TV shows (which is logical as there are 300 channels offered). They can force caps on the number of boxes without forcing you to use their proprietary boxes. With cable card enabled boxes they still control the distribution of cable cards. <!--QuoteBegin-l ordofduct Or would you rather be forced to have to keep all the channels that are tuned in in a certain range of eachother. (i.e. if living room is on 100 then all other channels in the house can not be within so many channels of that... this would be because data is transferred through several different lines or "transponders" to relieve stress on other stations)[/quote] While I don't know much about cable systems, it would seem that the bandwidth bottleneck would be at the last mile not at the point of transmission so I don't see how this scenario would come into play. The problem would become the number of simultaneous channels + on-demand users on a particular segment of the network. Actually, I'm fortunate enough to have a cable company that has switched to cable card boxes (at least I'm pretty sure it's cable card, there's some kind of smart card in the front of my box) and seems to have plenty bandwidth to spare (6Mbit+ up/ 1Mbit down internet at standard cable pricing). Now if someone could just come out with a cable card enabled TV Tuner card for the PC I'd be all set.

		lordofduct	May 18, 2005
		The thing with the cards is you can purchase CAM or Magic Cards out there that you can flash with illegal firmware that decrypts the signals allowing access to their channels. If you eliminate the cards and sell it all in box it makes it more difficult to do. (not impossible, but much much more difficult)

		ExCyber	May 19, 2005
		That assumes that the CAM has been cracked in the first place. As far as I know, DirecTV has managed to avoid this for several years or so with their latest revision. Plus, if you do it right each cable company would have to be cracked individually.

		lordofduct	May 19, 2005
		yeah, but there are always people trying to crack them, just as they are with videogames and other stuff. Sometimes it takes, sometimes it never happens. It all depends. But using a box without a CAM cuts down the chances by a lot. Its all in the cost of money. They have guys thinking up ideas of how to effectively reduce pirating while getting reasonable service to people. They probably have damn good reasons that we dont even know of for doing what they do, its not like they do it just to laugh or fuck with us.