[mythtv] Handling independent CI devices

Issa Gorissen flop.m at usa.net
Tue Mar 1 21:50:22 UTC 2011


------ Original Message ------
Received: 08:16 PM CET, 03/01/2011
From: Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com>
To: Development of MythTV <mythtv-dev at mythtv.org>
Subject: Re: [mythtv] Handling independent CI devices

> MythTV has always held the same stance on such devices.  The same code 
> that could be used to support independent hardware CAMs could just as 
> easily support software CAMs.  The only significant use of softcams, and 
> similarly the only significant use of such an interface in MythTV, would 
> be for subscription theft.  While this does mean we can't use devices 
> such as the ones you mention, this was a decision made long ago that we 
> stand by.  The only way we would support such devices would be if access 
> to the CAM were managed by the driver, and we got unencrypted video out 
> of it like as happens with tuners with built in CAMs.
> 
> Any delayed decryption would be completely out of the question for 
> MythTV anyway.  Far too much in the recording chain would have to be 
> rewritten to support such capability, and management of resources in 
> relation to livetv would be an extremely difficult hurdle.


Raymond,

I haven't talked about softcam nor delayed decryption, have I ?

To my understanding, you don't know the device I'm talking about. Please take
a look at this URL <http://www.digitaldevices.de/produkte.html>

Take for instance the Octopus, 4 tuners, 1 ci. There is nothing related to
softcam here. You have to buy a regular CAM like the one from SMIT or from
MASCOM, and use a regular subscriber card.

Those devices are designed in such a way that the CI is not bound to the
tuners. Look, in any case, the current DVB API would not work for those
devices. How would the driver know for which tuner it should decrypt ? Or it
would mean to hardcode in the driver that tuner 1 is linked to the ci and only
tuner 1 can be used to decrypt, isn't this suboptimal ?

Now, I will give you a use case for this Octopus card.

Take 1 mythtv backend, 4 frontends, a powerful CAM which can decrypt at least
4 different services, the subscription card; support for this Octopus card +
ci would allow the 4 frontends to watch the channel they want with no
restriction of being on the same transponder. You have to agree that this
would be nice.



More information about the mythtv-dev mailing list