Hi there,

I was recently digitizing some VHS tapes that a friend gave me back in 1995 of some movies and shows he recorded off premium cable channels with an illegal descrambler. I remember him showing me the descrambler once and it was a Scientific Atlanta model
- I remember because my parents had a similar one at home that they got from the cable company. Theirs was legit.

In any event, the tapes he recorded still play fine, but every minute there is bright "flash" that lasts maybe a fraction of a second. I once paused the tape during such a flash and saw a scrambled version of the signal - almost like what you would see
if you tuned to the scrambled channel. These "flashes" have always been on the tapes and are not due to my equipment (e.g., VCR, capture card). I can only assume they are some byproduct of his descrambler. I did some searching on this newsgroup and I
think this was a side effect of some illegal descramblers and was referred to as "flashing" or "flickering" back in the day.

I realize all of this is, ultimately, inconsequential. But, I'm kind of a tech geek, and I would be curious to know what caused this "flashing." It's not on all of the tapes he recorded, so seems to have been a random thing. I once timed the flashes and
it seemed that they occurred every 50 seconds or so. Was his descrambler dying?

I know the cable companies occasionally sent "bullets" to destroy illegal/unauthorized descramblers and equipment. Is it possible the flashing was caused by damage from a bullet or other cable company countermeasure?

I know this is all kind of weird. I'd just be curious to know what was up from a tech standpoint, and also because I was always kind of sentimental about these particular tapes for reasons I won't bore you with.

Thanks in advance for any input,
JS

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The Philogynist <thephilogynist87@gmail.com> wrote:

I know the cable companies occasionally sent "bullets" to destroy
illegal/unauthorized descramblers and equipment. Is it possible the
flashing was caused by damage from a bullet or other cable company
countermeasure?

I don't think so.

The bullet stuff was limited to the c-band satellite decoders (Videochipher) which used an access card that was reprogrammed with the pirate software. At some point the engineers figured out not only how to deactivate the card (disable the pirate software) but also cause the card to "loop" where it couldn't be reprogrammed anymore. There were unloopers later on but they
were never 100%.

With the cable tv systems, most of them (jerrold, hamlin, scientific
atlanta, others) mostly relied on horizontal sync suppression with the audio moved from the 4.5Mhz to "somewhere else".

The problem was, once someone figured out how it was done, there really was
no protection anymore. They started to experiment with video inversion where whites became blacks, blacks to white and everything inbetween shifted
between those two points.

Since the pirate box had no clue how to deal with that, it would show up as
a photographic negative when the inversion was on and normal when not. The problem with this whole new level of protection was it didn't really work
well out in the field. Legit subscribers sometimes would get the flash
glitch, usually it was the complaint of a shift in contrast levels.

This inversion method could be applied to every other frame of video (I
guess 15x per second) with most systems, generally it was applied to random intervals. But, besides cable tv back then was analog and problems with
signal strength to customers homes, most tv's and vcr's (all analog based) didn't help the situation.

I beleive most cable companies that upgraded to the newer systems just quit using the video inversion all together at some point. Just too many
complaints from customers.

So no magic bullet involved, just a modification to some cable systems.

-bruce
bje@ripco.com

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Monday, September 6, 2021 at 10:57:51 AM UTC-4, b...@ripco.com wrote:

The Philogynist <thephilo...@gmail.com> wrote:

I know the cable companies occasionally sent "bullets" to destroy illegal/unauthorized descramblers and equipment. Is it possible the flashing was caused by damage from a bullet or other cable company countermeasure?

I don't think so.

The bullet stuff was limited to the c-band satellite decoders (Videochipher) which used an access card that was reprogrammed with the pirate software. At some point the engineers figured out not only how to deactivate the card (disable the pirate software) but also cause the card to "loop" where it couldn't be reprogrammed anymore. There were unloopers later on but they were never 100%.

With the cable tv systems, most of them (jerrold, hamlin, scientific atlanta, others) mostly relied on horizontal sync suppression with the audio moved from the 4.5Mhz to "somewhere else".

The problem was, once someone figured out how it was done, there really was no protection anymore. They started to experiment with video inversion where whites became blacks, blacks to white and everything inbetween shifted between those two points.

Since the pirate box had no clue how to deal with that, it would show up as a photographic negative when the inversion was on and normal when not. The problem with this whole new level of protection was it didn't really work well out in the field. Legit subscribers sometimes would get the flash glitch, usually it was the complaint of a shift in contrast levels.

This inversion method could be applied to every other frame of video (I guess 15x per second) with most systems, generally it was applied to random intervals. But, besides cable tv back then was analog and problems with signal strength to customers homes, most tv's and vcr's (all analog based) didn't help the situation.

I beleive most cable companies that upgraded to the newer systems just quit using the video inversion all together at some point. Just too many complaints from customers.

So no magic bullet involved, just a modification to some cable systems.

-bruce
b...@ripco.com

Hey Bruce,

Thanks for the reply. I wasn't sure my post would get any attention.

That is interesting information about the countermeasures for c-band satellite piracy. I remember reading about a "bullet" for satellite television, specifically the VideoCipher units which I believe were made by General Instruments. Henry Eisenson's
book "The Television Gray Market" goes into some detail about this. It's an interesting, though quite dated at this point, read about the wild west days of satellite TV and piracy.

It does seem as though there was some cable variant of a "bullet", however. Here are a couple articles about it:

https://schematicsforfree.com/files/Video/Misc/Cable%20TV%27s%20Infamous%20Bullet.pdf

https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1897190002.pdf

I'm not saying this explains what is on those videos, just that it seems some kind of "bullet" for cable did, in fact, exist back then.

I'm not sure if the system utilized video inversion or not. I know it was Scientific Atlanta as my parents had the SA 8590 as provided by the cable company. We lived a few streets away from my friend with the pirate descrambler and we were both serviced
by the same cable company. His box seemed like a much earlier generation. I believe he told me once it was "chipped." I'm assuming it was a standard converter/descrambler that someone put a test chip in to authorize all the channels. I do recall it had
some other weird issues as well, such as some of the premium channels coming in very light - the video itself was very light. The channels were also in a random order as opposed to being in the same order on other televisions in his house, or at my
house. Doesn't seem like his descrambler was the greatest choice for that system, yet it pretty much did the job.

Thanks again for the response.

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