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Originally Posted by Horizon
I fully understand what you're talking about, I am just surprised that FTA channels exist on cable as I was told several years ago they would be axed. If they're still there, great. It will give me something to look at when I do get a new cable pc card.
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If you look at the digitalbitrate site and click on "details" where you see an FTA channel, there is a screencap taken at the time of the scan. I think that should really be sufficient "proof".
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If most of the transport streams are encrypted, I accept some are not, how does he know what the contents of the streams actually contains, unless you are saying he has equipment which can crack VM's encyption system?
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The transport streams aren't encrypted, individual video / audio streams within them are. Things have moved on since the days of analogue, a transport stream can contain a mixture of encrypted and FTA services.
The individual streams still conform to the DVB standard, e.g. an encrypted video stream will still show up as, say, an MPEG2 Video stream and would be identified as such in the Program Map Table for that service. Basically, each video stream on each transport stream can be identified to an existing service and there were no additional, unidentified video streams. A Transport Stream Analyser does all of that automatically. Encryption doesn't "hide" the video streams within the transport stream, it just means there are additional ECM/EMM streams present to deal handle encryption and decryption in the set top box. The presence of the streams can be validated, that doesn't mean that the actual video/audio content of the streams can be decrypted and viewed (by the TS Analyser), that's simply not necessary.
Basically, encrypted channels carry extra streams to unscramble the contents of the video/audio streams in conjunction with the VM STB rather than hiding the streams. Again, the presence of these streams can be seen on the digitalbitrate site, which presumably uses some sort of TS analyser but uses a fixed template to display the results. Just click on "details" for an encrypted channel listed on that site, it will show the presence of the ECM streams and the type of encryption used.
The information on that site is accurate, although becoming out of date as the TS scanner appears to have been turned off recently.