Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)

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.

Re: Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)

#8

Post by charles_f » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

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.

Re: Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)

#9

Post by whynotmaybe » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

charles_f wrote: post #8

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.

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.

Re: Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)

#10

Post by kangs » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 5:38 PM UTC

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.