In Poland Canal+ was encrypted like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z83bIGiRVy4
I'm guessing it's a latter version?
Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)
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Re: Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)
#12In Poland Canal+ was encrypted like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z83bIGiRVy4 I'm guessing it's a latter version?
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.)
Re: Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)
#13Super interesting article.
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.
Re: Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)
#14> Piracy became rampant. Asking for "TBA 970" delay chips in electronic stores prompted employees to offer the full list required to build a "decodeur pirate". The encryption system was updated to Nagravision encryption in 1992 and Discret 11 was retired by 1995.
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.
Re: Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)
#15If 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.
> That came very handy to many a teenager on late Saturday evenings.
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 ; )
Re: Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)
#16If 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.
> That came very handy to many a teenager on late Saturday evenings. 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 ; )
> GP is referring to Canal+ who'd play that one weekly porn movie on saturday evening.
As an Anglophone it counts as taking a 1-credit foreign language class.
Re: Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)
#17The canal+ bumper jingle mentioned in the article goes incredibly hard. It's a shame we don't see anything like this on modern big tv.
Re: Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)
#18Spaniard there. We didn't need C+ for anime as local regions with languages distinct to Spanish got original DB and several more animes (Captain Tsubasa, easy choice for Europe), Doraemon et all.
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.
Re: Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)
#19The canal+ bumper jingle mentioned in the article goes incredibly hard. It's a shame we don't see anything like this on modern big tv. https://fabiensanglard.net/discret11/jingle_clear.mp4
The Spanish version was even more amazing and retro-futuristic, kinda like a paradoxical tune:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZHzMbFXAcM
The one for Spain was the 2nd one.
Re: Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)
#20If 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.
> That came very handy to many a teenager on late Saturday evenings. 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 ; )
In the UK we had the Red Triangle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_triangle_(Channel_4) where we stayed up late for the hope of some sexy fun times, and we were exposed to culture and not nearly as much nudity as we had hoped for.