> >> The second more important issue is the legality. I have read a lot of >> postings >> about this and as far as I can see it is legal. There is no encryption on >> the >> channels. They are simply sent is a way which most boxes are unable to >> pick up >> the reception (the streams pretend to be subtitles). >> >> All the Xtraview site says is: >> "XTRAVIEW uses proprietary Top Up TV technology. You must not attempt to >> decompile, disassemble, modify or reverse engineer this technology." >> That's fine. I didn't. >> > > I haven't had chance to try the patch yet, but, on the legal side it > does raise an interesting question. > > For anyone unfamiliar with "Xtraview", it is an attempt by a UK DVB-T > operator to broadcast pay tv, without the use of real conditional > access/encryption technology. Instead of encrypting their broadcast, > they remove all valid references to it in PMT table in the DVB stream, > and do not correctly label the PIDs as MPEG video and audio. Instead, > the viewer is redirected to a set of PIDs carrying no/invalid data, and > an interactive MHEG application is launched. > > The application generates a serial number, and hashes it to create > another number, which the user finds out by dialing a premium rate > number. If he/she then enters the correct number, the interactive > application directs the receiver to the correct PIDs, and they can then > watch. > > While effective for MOST set top boxes that do not allow manual PID > entry, anyone with a DVB-T PCI card, or even some set top boxes that do > allow manual PID entry, the system has a gaping hole in that all you > need to do is be told of the PID numbers or analyse the transport stream > yourself to find out what the numbers are. > > So then, is this decompiling, disassembling, modifying or reverse > engineering this technology? I don't think so, as you are at no point > reverse engineering their key generation algorithms etc., you're just > manually tuning in a channel, which circumvents their application, but > doesn't actually 'hack' the service as such. > > Their is the legal argument of intent though; as by doing this you are > still technically stealing the service, regardless of the technical > arguments of how you did though. > > As far as MythTV is concerned though, all this patch does is allow Myth > to manually decode video streams on xtraviews pids. I guess its the same > argument as for BitTorrent et al., they don't break any laws; it may > allow you to do so, but manually entering the PID values is still valid > way of receiving any other broadcasts legally or otherwise; it doesn't > break the law in itself. But writing a patch to Specifically get around > this one scenario.... seems like a grey area! >
Excellent, thanks for that explanation. I wondered how consumers would access the service. _______________________________________________ mythtv-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-dev
