Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)
fabiensanglard.netWhen 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.
Super 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.
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.
I had friends who recorder the stream on VHS, thinking they could decoded it later by borrowing a decoder. Reportedly, it did not work.
> 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.
> 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.
Where I lived the paytv encryption just removed the sync signals and audio and by finetuning the TV you could get a fairly clean black and white picture. It sounds similar to Discret 11 but it wasn't quite the same.
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.
The 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.
The (current, I believe) BBC News jingle is a real banger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc9xLvrV_Zw
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' Bbfor anyone out of the loop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQNCCn5zIEM
it's got nothing on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_nk8PzL0Zw
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.
An ancient Easter egg is revealed at the end of this interesting article. The "all free" code was `1337` or "leet" in leet!
Not quite. The T is silent.
In 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.)
"meuh meuh TV" was a famous one
Wilma and MoreTV in Spain for Windows, Xdtv/Xawtv with some Nagravision patch or plugin.
Interesting! Over in the UK we had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCrypt
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.
Asking for "TBA 970" delay chips in electronic stores prompted employees to offer the full list required to build a "decodeur pirate"
Good ol' civil disobedience. Love it.
Good memories on the #secafrance irc channel getting the update codes from time to time to reprogram the home made security cards for official 'decodeurs'
> 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.
> 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.
So it’s a scrambler?
Spaniard 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.
Most Animes in France were on TF1, not on canal+.
Canal+ had a few animes not suited for kids and a few others that didn't really fit the catalog from TF1 or TMC (which was mostly available south of France). Those 2 had volume, Canal+ had more "quality" ones.
I remember watching Akira, some DBZ movies, Evangelion, Vision of Escaflowne, Armitage III and many others!
[2020]