FACT AND FICTION N3 Rollout

[sidsnot]

surely the reason for self install is cost cutting,, not they think all there installers have hacked N3
really wish some people would remember its a hobby,,,

oh this bit killed me

I have been asked to give detailed guide from within the depths of the software wizards departments.

[TheCoder]

Originally Posted by sr20

You can't be saying sky have been doing ADSL over previous years just so they can do TIVO lol.

Their whole reason for rolling out the ADSL was so they could, at some point, introduce a VOD response to VM. From what i've heard Sky fully intend to start a VOD type service in the relatively near future.

They certainly wont be using any Tivo system (Sky have no interest in using third party solutions) but their inhouse solution to the same problem is meant to be pretty advanced.

No doubt Sky wont bother spending on this set of responses until it absolutely needs to do so in order to compete with anything VM offer but make no mistake, Sky have silently being making sure that they have access to everything reqiured for that response !

[lincsat]

Even Freesat are testing the BBC I-Player on the Humax boxes ready for a Spring launch, ITV Player will follow soon after. There's little doubt the Sky VOD will be more advanced than the freesat offering.

[sr20]

Originally Posted by TheCoder

Their whole reason for rolling out the ADSL was so they could, at some point, introduce a VOD response to VM. From what i've heard Sky fully intend to start a VOD type service in the relatively near future.

They certainly wont be using any Tivo system (Sky have no interest in using third party solutions) but their inhouse solution to the same problem is meant to be pretty advanced.

No doubt Sky wont bother spending on this set of responses until it absolutely needs to do so in order to compete with anything VM offer but make no mistake, Sky have silently being making sure that they have access to everything reqiured for that response !

Yup I meant VOD sorry not TIVO.

The big companies such as VM and Sky really try to get you to take all 3 products from them. Which is why we get the heavy discounts from both Sky and VM if you take TV, BB and phone all at the same time.

Of course ADSL requires a BT line, so Sky can only offer calls via carrier preselect, rather than the line itself.

VOD has been a far more recent development for both VM and Sky, than the long existing BB packages. Sky are (maybe - see below) adding VOD to keep up with VM, it just so happened that they have existing ADSL packages.

AFAIK it'll be quite a lot of work for Sky to add VOD because their boxes don't have a BB modem. Unlike HFC networks, ADSL will not support multiple connections on the same line. It'd have to be provided via a wifi add on for the box to connect to the Sky WIFI router...if in fact the boxes even support such an interface.

The only other possibility is for Sky to drop their broadband package completely, and issue cheap wired ADSL modems to plug directly into the back of the STB...which clearly isn't going to happen.

Can't see VOD on Sky happening any time soon tbh, and ADSL packages from SKY are nothing to do with a masterplan to offer VOD.

[lincsat]

With the Sky+HD boxes having an Ethernet connection, it would be quite easy to connect to the router. I would suspect that any VOD would be buffered through the HDD anyway.

[sr20]

Originally Posted by lincsat

With the Sky+HD boxes having an Ethernet connection, it would be quite easy to connect to the router. I would suspect that any VOD would be buffered through the HDD anyway.

True, as long as having the router right next to the V+ box is a suitable place for signal etc for other wifi devices.

Also if only the v+ boxes have Ethernet, people would have to subscribe to V+ to get VOD @ £18pcm. Bandwidth would be a problem as VM stream VOD through the HFC for the headend it was requested from. Sky wouldn't be able to do this, as it's just 1 sat pointing at everyone. It'd take too much bandwidth on the sat.

VOD would have to be streamed via the broadband, which wouldn't be possible with the 2M 'base' ADSL that comes free with V+.

They'd have to add a higher speed broadband package which won't work on all lines anyway...and at greater expense

[Rick]

Originally Posted by lincsat

With the Sky+HD boxes having an Ethernet connection, it would be quite easy to connect to the router. I would suspect that any VOD would be buffered through the HDD anyway.

They have made space for it already. Half the HDD in them is reserved for Anytime, which could easially be realocated to VOD.

[TheCoder]

Lets examine this in detail and do some debunking (Yes, its a Friday night and i'm bored)

Originally Posted by TheKeyMaster

Before you start reading I must warn you that this is in depth and intended to be a useful guide

ok, first point. There's nothing detailed in this and certainly nothing that could be called a guide. Its all rumour and, in a lot of cases, very badly thought out wishful thinking.

...not an excuse by many to hurl abuse or start of panic amongst the remaining lucky ones.

No idea what thats supposed to mean. As far as N3 is concerened there aren't any lucky ones !

I have been asked to give detailed guide from within the depths of the software wizards departments.

Not a chance these guys would even give the time of day to someone who lacks even the most basic of knowledge on the subject. Only an incompetent would ask another incompetant to make a detailed guide on something they know nothing about.

I do not want money and will not be releasing K**Ys,

Probably a good idea. I doubt it would be worth your while and probably wouldn't keep you in red bull for very long !

however I will give you the latest news, remove any doubt over the various rumours and myths flying around.

If this is meant to be the latest news then I say roll on the myths. A lot of them have at least a grain of truth to them.

Firstly I can assure you that experts in this field are currently working night and day, living on Pop tarts and Red Bull in an attempt to find a solution to the latest switch off.

I can assure you most of the experts are well beyond Red Bull and pop tarts. Thats food for script-kiddies, not smartcard experts !

Latest Area to be hit was the area known as Kirklees, which includes Huddersfield, firstly a number of channels moved, then VM rang to offer 2 months free, closely followed by SLY offer great new deals, then the new cards arrived. 2 weeks later black screens and Scrambled Channels, for a further 4 days a number of premier channels including Sly sports 1-4, Sly 1, V1 etc stayed on, as VM checked to ensure that all paying clients had not been disrupted. Once this was confirmed it was blackout for almost every Channel.

True enough in whats said perhaps but not exactly the latest news is it. Just yet another vague description of what most people already know.

Incredibly the initial results from Eire and Leeds suggested that subscription rose but way short of expectations for VM, however Sly subscriptions rocketed by comparison with most new customers taking up HD subscriptions. Saying this both companies did expect a much higher take up of their services.

Again, not exactly news and, tbh, not really very accurate. I dont think you have access to the actual statistics but VM are actually quite pleased with the amount of new subscriptions and package updates they have received so far. Sky, as expected, have also profited as has the sale of freeview type boxes.

As so often other alternatives started to appear, C**d Share, Internet solutions, Freeview Sat Hacks etc. At the same time the scammers, con men and idiots started to release false hopes and claims, many you have probably seen whilst searching for a fix, these include Ebay lots claiming to have K*ys for sale, New boxes that will work no matter what, new Firmware from foreign countries and the old my mates, pals farther has.... etc

More filler thats not really required. Its pretty obvious this would happen but its not really pertinent to a "detailed" guide is it ?

So where are we really at.

Ooh do tell, the anticipation is killing me......

There is a lot of companies out there from manufactures to distributers who stand to lose insane amounts of profit, they have become accustomed to.

Really ?

I dont think its as much as you suspect. Most of the manufacturers supporting these boxes are either quite large (ie Fortec type companies) and are only selling rebadged boxes into a niche market (with fairly minimal support) that doesn't affect their main market of legit boxes or they are very small manufacturers often only having one or two engineers and subbing all real manufacturing to dedicated board builders. There's really no insane profits being made, at least at the manufacturing level. Distrubuters are making profit, but again its not insane in comparison to the profits on most electrical goods. I wont deny its probably a nice earner but I doubt people are getting fabulously wealthy !

They have a vested interest in getting things back to how it was before, when they produce Fully legal Free to Air boxes at 5 times the cost of a box say from Argos.

I'll think you'll find Argos has never sold cable boxes. Its true enough that terrestrial boxes (essentially very similar components) can be had from Argos for less than £20 but these boxes are literally manufactured in batches of 25,000 units. Most of the cable manufacturers would deem themselves lucky if they manufactured in more than 1000 unit batches with total start to end runs of probably 10-15,000 units total !

An exception to this is probably the dreambox type boxes. Its certain that those were made in quantitiies where they could of been sold for less than £50. I guess we now know why DreamMultimeda lot didn't like the clone box manufacturers muscling in !

Rest assured that those with a vested interest have thrown every available resource at this. They may already have a solution,.

lol, i've heard one or two manufacturers have sent half a dozen or so far Eastern programmers over to have a quick shufty. I presume thats what you mean by every resource.

I

f so would it be viable to release this until they felt that VM had stretched the budget enough not to upgrade on such a scale again, would it not be wise to hold back until the majority of the UK had been upgraded.

VM is a very small fish in the N3 market. Why do you think VM would actually have anything to do with regards to an N3 hack ?

As far as N3 is concerned, the UK is totally irrelevant. The manufacturers (and the card hackers) would be far more interested in other markets. Markets that have already had N3 for over 2 years without significant signs of any compromise.

In saying that, resellers have been work hard individually and together as a collective, to find a solution and 3 promising lines have been brought to my attention.

Well, now I know your fibbing. Most of these people would quite happily put a bullet in each others brains so absolutely no chance of them ever working together !

The first is based on Portugal and in a smaller part Spain, where an N3 equivalent has been opened up for some time now, with a little searching on the web you can find every line of code used within the encryption, and the coding applied to open the channels up.

Think you need to read up a little on this particular compromise. It was a very slight card bug that allowed something it shouldn't. The bug was very quickly fixed with a card update patch. The card was never opened and keys were never compromised.

It is possible to manually feed in K*ys at the moment for certain boxes, but they tend to expire quickly, even then by using the USB port and a basic computer this can result in almost seamless viewing. This said it is a question of which boxes could emulate a computer to achieve this.

What. Feed what keys into where ???

I can only presume your trying to talk about cardsharing here but that description is pretty garbled and indicates a total lack of understanding.

The second line of investigation follows on from the above, where new chips need to be added to existing boxes, thereby allowing them to have enough power to generate K*Ys. The down side of this is the skill level required to remove and then replace chips and the basic cost of these rumoured to be £58 per unit. I have to say I can’t see retailers been to keen to publicly advertise this service.

We'll give that a lmfao and leave it at that !

The 3<SUP>rd</SUP> line is the new generator coding scripts, uploaded as before. The problem is they are having extreme difficulty in descrambling encryption in nearly all the old doggy boxes, even those supplied by the VM engineers.

What ???

Generator scripts ???

Whatever are you on about. I can only guess its got something to do with extracting pairing keysets from boxes in order to do cardsharing but really I cant make much sense of it.

[TheCoder]

continued as this forum doesn't allow long posts !!!

New boxes would of course make the manufacturer happy and rich once again. VM have been aware of the issues of their own engineers assisting people wanting extra channels, so much so that most people are now getting self install kits sent by post.

Not sure what that really has to do with a "detailed" guide. Seems to be stating the obvious, yet again.

My conclusions are that if there is a fix already out there with the manufacturers then this will only be released when they feel they can get the most both in life cycle and profit. If the distributer find a solution they will want it out as quick as possible for everyone and probably for free, as most will be sat on stock piles of boxes (currently classed as dead money).

Very probably, but as there isn't a solution available (other than cardsharing) its a rather strange concluson for a "detailed" guide. Again, there's nothng striking in there that we dont already know.

Don’t give up hope yet as it will only be a matter of time before a solution is released, be aware of scams and get the old DVD collection out for a while.

lol, informed guesswork or wishful thinking ?

I hope this helps everyone who has had the patience to read my ramblings.

Well, I guess we can agree that waas a fair set of ramblings. I am however still waiting for the detailed and useful guide. Perhaps we can expect it in the next installment.

[G77]

nice post.