Voip teleophony - Anyone know Packet-8 or others?

[Bill McGonigle]

On Dec 13, 2005, at 16:51, Travis Roy wrote:

> The problem is that HD on any cable or sat system is scrambled, so you 
> would need to descramble the channel in order to record it. You can't 
> do that with the cards out on the market.

I took a look once at doing this for my Dish Network service (the Dish 
DVR is crummy...).  Dish uses a DVB-S with a DVB-CA-compliant 
Nagravision 2 smartcard cypher (all standards - good start).

The Linux V4L project has code to understand DVB-S signals and support 
for PCI DVB-S cards with a slot to offload to a DVB-CA processor like 
Nagravision.  In theory, I just buy all these parts, connect the coax, 
slide in my smartcard, and ... well, see what I get.

All the parts are available (often from Europe where DVB is more 
prevalant) but it was a experiment with a small chance of instant 
success as there was some indication from the lists that the DVB-CA 
code was bitrotted.  If I were in the business of selling MythDVR's 
this would be a no-brainer to invest $500 in parts and a week hacking 
V4L code to open up a new customer base.

The relentless criminal prosecution and legal harassment of hobbyists 
who buy satellite smartcard gear also makes this unattractive.    There 
are some people who make a living selling systems which defeat the DRM 
on satellite signals, which is illegal, but at least DirectTV subpoenas 
entire customer lists from vendors and start sending the goons instead 
of adhering to some standard of evidence of illegal activity.  Grand, 
ain't it?

-Bill
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