[linux-dvb] Re: Kernel OOPS

["Robert Schlabbach" <robert_s@gmx.net>]

From: "Oliver Endriss" <o.endriss@gmx.de>
> > People have invested real money into these full featured DVB cards
> > and just don't want to throw them away.
> > Plus, there just isn't any reasonable alternative
>
> Full-featured ack. ;-)

Full-featured cards are "legacy hardware", they have no future. Thus,
future looking development should be centered around _current_ hardware,
and it has become quite obvious that so-called "budget" cards are a much
better solution, because they are cheap and allow much more flexibility
when it comes to handling the incoming data, simply because that's all done
in software.

> AFAIK there is _no_ budget card driver with CI support under linux.

Not yet, although Andrew and I have pretty much figured out how the
hardware works. However, I am out of it for the foreseeable time, because
the only type of CAM I can afford for development purposes (ZetaCAM, Free-X
TV, IceCrypt) all happen to be incompatible with TechnoTrend's Budget-CI
(and a number of other receivers, so the fault appears to be with the
French manufacturer Neotion, who seems to have some trouble understanding
the PC Card specs).

Not sure about Andrew's status, last I heard he still couldn't get his
hands on any Budget-CI card. It's almost as if some higher power doesn't
_want_ us to make progress on this :-(

> And, unless there is a hardware or firmware CSA descrambler on the card,
> you will never be able to decrypt pay-tv in a legal way.
> IANAL, but I don't think that anyone can write a CSA descrambler under
GPL.

That's incorrect. You don't needs to implement CSA, the MPEG-2 transport
stream from the demodulator is physically routed through the CAM, which
implements CSA. Thus, it can be done in a perfectly legal way.

Regards,
--
Robert Schlabbach
e-mail: robert_s@gmx.net
Berlin, Germany



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