Nick -D-vB
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Nick [D]vB’s Completely Hypothetical Top Up TV
CardSharing Guide.
So, you want to share your Top Up TV subscription between several DVB-T PC devices and set -top decoders simultaneously – well now you can! Our friends on the euro-sat scene have been very busy coding all kinds of useful programs for the S*ca2 system and many of them can be used with Top Up TV. All the software is free and available on the upload centres and P2P networks. To make your life a bit easier I have uploaded some of the hard to find stuff here:
[ if all the links are dead try again later]
S*ca2 CardServers
On the server side you will need a Phoenix interface to read the card, these devices are easy to build but ready made devices can be picked up on EBay for about £10. Pay for a USB one if you want but serial ones will do the job.
Next you need a cardsharing program that supports S*ca2, the Linux projects have been around for a while but now there are two for window$ aswell, they are DanK’s CardServer and Samsung Spider Server.
If, for some reason, you want to connect devices that are not on your local area network you can obviously use an internet connection. The bandwidth requirements are tiny even when running several clients, I have had up to seven devices running off one smartcard before, and that was using a 56K modem! I would recommend that you use a dynamic DNS system, that way you don’t have to reconfigure all the clients every time your IP address changes or if you move the server to another PC. Two good hosts with free accounts are DynDNS and No-IP.
PC Clients
Now for the clients, for your PC devices you will need a DVB viewing program that supports the MultiDec API. The old TechnoTrend / Hauppauge Nova-T’s can use ProgDVB and the new Hauppauge Nova-T MCE devices [and any other DVB-T devices with BDA drivers] can use MyTheatre. Nebula have just added MD-API support to DigiTV 3.2 [ I wonder where they got that idea? ] so you can now use all their devices aswell. Infact, the only PC DVB-T device you can’t use is the DEC2000-T which unfortunately would need a firmware hack to work with any softCAM.
You then need a client plugin to connect to the server, I recommend Yankse 1.3 but CSC 4.0 and WinCSC 1.1 should also work. Setting up PC clients is quite straightforward; CSC and WinCSC are setup through their GUI’s but the Yankse client is configured by opening the Yankse.ini file in a text editor.
STB Decoder and IDTV Clients
If you want to connect a set-top box decoder or integrated digital television to the server you will also need another cheap device known as a season interface, again these are very easy to build but can also be found on Ebay for about £10 [some more expensive versions have cardreaders (for logging) and a power connection but you don’t need these features]. The season interface connects via the CAM, or through an *embedded smartcard reader, it is then connected to a PC through a serial port.
Once you got you box hooked up you need some smartcard emulation software. The only S*ca2 card emulator I know of with a cardserver client is DanK’s SEACLI 0.4. I helped beta test it and can confirm it works perfectly with the Aston 1.05 CAM, [which you can also find on EBay for about £15]. I have not tested the official Top Up TV MediaGuard CAM but I should work to. I have only tested SEACLI with a Nokia MediaMaster 221-T and a NetGem I-Player but it should work with any STB or IDTV with a common interface slot for the Aston CAM.
A couple of notes…
*It should also be possible to use SEACLI on set-top decoders that have embedded smartcard readers but you must first find out the baud-rate, parity and stop-bit settings for that reader. Some season interfaces have a clock measuring contact and I have heard that it is possible to calculate these values using a multi-meter.
CardServer only works for me when the phoenix interface is connected to COM1, it also reports an INS error when the card is reset but it works OK anyway.
Samsung Spider only works if you (re)start the server BEFORE enabling the Phoenix interface. SEACLI does work with Spider but is more stable when used with DanK’s CardServer.
SEACLI needs an INS.DAT file configured for the provider you want to watch, I have included a file pre-configured for TUTV in the installer but if you want to share a TUTV card with a TVX subscription on it you will need to use some S*ca MOSC software like Moscpheo Turbo to extract the additional provider information and then add it to the INS.DAT file.
If your STB or IDTV freezes when watching a Top Up TV channel you do not normally have to restart SEACLI. Just slide the season interface in and out of the CAM and it should restart, if that doesn’t work then power off [standby won’t work] the device and it will restart as normal when you turn it back on.
If you are sharing your card continuously you will need to put it in a STB [ or use it with PMCAM ] for half an hour or so each month so that it can get the key updates for the next month from the EMM stream. If you don’t do this your card will stop working and you will need to ring Top Up TV and request a re-activation.
If you have a Nebula DigiTV device and want to use the DigiTV 3.2 software you will need to use Yankse. Nebula [deliberately?] coded their MultIDec plug-ins interface to only load Poor Man’s CAM so you need to rename the Yankse.dll / .ini files to PMCAM2.dll / .ini to get it to load. You will not be able to open Yankse’s GUI but you can configure all the options through the ini file anyway.
Due to the stupid design of the MediaMaster 221-T’s case you need to find a season interface with a very long cardstrip or do what I did and cut a normal season in two and then reconnect the cardstrip with a ribbon cable. If you can’t be bothered with all that you could always just leave the case off!
The NetGem I-Player is very similar to the DreamBox [IBM PowerPC running Linux] because this box already has a network connection if someone can work out how to install the dreambox’s cardsharing software it could be used as a standalone server and other I-Player clients wouldn’t need to be connected to a PC at all! [ when the French DTT system takes off I hope there will be more work done on cracking this box ].
THE LEGAL BIT:
I do not condone the use of cardserver software to allow people to share a subscription illegally, its very naughty, you will go to hell, etc, etc.
Using any devices other than those specified by Top Up TV may violate your user agreement BUT IT IS NOT ILLEGAL.
This guide is deigned to enable you to share YOUR legal Top Up TV subscription between YOUR devices.
Allowing a third party, without a subscription, to view the service using this system WOULD PROBABLY BE ILLEGAL in the UK
[ But technically so is letting your mates come round to watch it on your TV ! ]
Needless to say the authors of the software and myself take no responsibly if you choose to break the law, you have been warned….
Nick [D]vB
;)
rdServer and Samsung Spider Server.