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.
Didn't operate for long? 1984-1995 - its long enough. Still remember seeing those scrambled programs in France.
At the time in UK, lets say 87-92, the concept of paid tv over the air was incredible. Satellite existed, but wasn't very prevalent.
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.
GP is referring to Canal+ who'd play that one weekly porn movie on saturday evening.
Us kids from the eighties could watch like 30 seconds unencrypted, than the scrambling would start.
We'd still watch the movie ; )
As an Anglophone it counts as taking a 1-credit foreign language class.
Only with a major scene change (eg day to night) this would need retuning. And this type of content didn't really do that, as most of these movies take place in the same bedroom :) so it was not a bad way to watch it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZHzMbFXAcM
The one for Spain was the 2nd one.
THIS IS THE BBC! DO NOT LISTEN TO THE OTHERS, THEY ARE THE FALSE PROPHETS!
How it was made: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/c3ge48d0v4go
It references the Greenwich pips played on BBC radio stations so people know they're on time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Time_Signal
If you want to play along:
countdown bass chord
46 Bb Bbm
42 Bb Eb
38 Bb Bbm
34 Bb Eb
30 Bb Bbm
26 F Fm
22 Gb Gb
18 Eb Eb
14 Gb Gb
10 Bb' Eb
6 Bb' BbI'm guessing it's a latter version?
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.)
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.
Good ol' civil disobedience. Love it.
We had one in the house. Very cheap and easy to get from north africa. Upgraded encryption was quickly matched with upgraded piracy. Then canalsat came along and you needed a memory card to keep your pirating hardware up to date, but it was still ok.
Now I don't watch TV, and DRM in browser doesn't seem to have been broken the same way.
But it doesn't matter because things like stremio give you the catalogs of all streaming services for free.
Seems like piracy never dies.
No I don't think it ever will.
A recent threat is the 'for your safety' bullshit like attestation, combined with closed down OSes like on mobile. But people will always find ways around.
In the 90's only the poshy people or university students (and OFC bars for soccer matches) could afford the monthly subscription. That was true until the mid-late 90's where cheap Avermedia TV tuners for PC (and Pentium MMX processors) could decode the nagravision streams for the cheap. And, yes, they mainly were used for porn and soccer matches, and some Hollywood blockbusters.
That died in from 2002/3 where cheap broadband was found everywhere and peple used P2P platforms like crazy.
Under GNU/Linux I remember XawTV-Nagra and Alevt for Teletext.
EDIT: it was XDtv, not XawTV. Good times, and often it was more interesting to decode stuff than actually watch it.
I remember watching Akira, some DBZ movies, Evangelion, Vision of Escaflowne, Armitage III and many others!