Top Up TV CardSharing Guide

Nick [D]vB

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Nick [D]vB’s Completely Hypothetical Top Up TV CardSharing Guide.

This is just an edited version of some of my posts from other boards; I hope someone finds it useful...

So, you want to share your Top Up TV subscription between several DVB-T PC devices or 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 SECA2 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:

Share files and collaborate on creative projects

http://home.ripway.com/2005-6/329780/TopUpTVCardSharingKit.exe

http://home.ripway.com/2005-3/277570/TopUpTVCardSharingKit.exe

https://www.sharemation.com/NickDvB/Top Up TV CardSharing Kit.exe

[DLMURL]http://www.jthomson.dsl.pipex.com/Top%20Up%20TV%20CardSharing%20Kit.exe[/DLMURL]

[ if all the links are dead try again later]


SECA2 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.

ph-sm%20orange.jpg


Next you need a cardsharing program that supports SECA2, the Linux projects have been around for a while but now there are some for window$ aswell, they are DanK’s C@rdServer, Samsung Spider Server, and MoscpheoTurbo.

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.

www.progdvb.com

www.dvbcore.com

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.

400.jpg


Once you've got your box hooked up you need some smartcard emulation software. The are now several SECA2 card emulators for windows with cardserver clients. I helpped beta test DanK’s SEACLI 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 on STBs…

*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.

C@rdServer 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 C@rdServer.

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 SECA 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 decoder 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 ].

Dank has stopped developing C@rdServer and SEACLI but is helping Feliciaco add cardserver and STB / Season client features into his great SECA2 MOSC tool "MoscpheoTurbo".

Get it here:

http://translate.google.com/transla...fe=off&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=/language_tools

Also check out DNA's CryptoEmulator which also works with TopUp.


"Off-line" Decryption of PC recordings:

If you have a Nova-T or Nebula DigiTV card for your PC you can start recording encrypted Top Up TV programs now and then decrypt them at a later date; after you have (re)subscribed or found a working cardserver.

The easiest way to do this is to record the whole transport stream on which the channel(s) you want to record is being broadcast.

[ but this method will use about 10Gb of disk space per hour! ]

If you want to save your disk space you can just save the Video / Audio and ECM streams using a program like TSReader or DVB Stream Explorer.

To decrypt the streams you will need an offline CSA descambler like TSoffDec or Joshyfun’s excellent OfflineDecoder program in conjunction with Poor Man’s CAM or a cardserver client like Yankse.

Once you have descrambled the program you will need to re-multiplex the stream using ProjectX, PVAStrumento or an MPEG2 editor like TMPGEnc. Your programs are then ready to watch or burn to DVD.

Most of the software is free and easy to find:

Transport Stream Dumping:

http://www.dvbstreamexplorer.dk/dvbstreamexplorer.php

http://www.coolstf.com/tsreader/

http://www.dsp-worx.de/index.php?n=11

http://www.stuffware.co.uk/stufftv/

Offline CSA:

http://joshyfun.peque.org/OfflineDescrambler/index.html

http://www.dvbsoft.net/download.php?list.40

http://www.dvbsoft.net/download.php?view.56

Re-mux:

http://www.offeryn.de/dv.htm

http://www.lucike.info/index.htm?http://www.lucike.info/page_projectx.htm

[DLMURL]http://www.tmpgenc.net/e_main.html[/DLMURL]


DVBSE doesn't work with the Nebula's BDA driver yet but you can use TS dumps from DigiTV. If you need PID / section filtering you will have to track down [cough] a copy of TSReader.

If you have a new Nova-T v90002 [MCE], Nova-T USB2, or another device with BDA drivers, you can use DC-DVB or the BDA module for DVBSE. If you have an old skool v909 Nova-T PCI card you can also save the full transport stream with StuffTV.

Only select the Audio, Video and ECM PIDS for the channel you want to decrypt. These might change so it's worth checking them yourself.

UKGOLD

MPEG-2 Video Elementary Stream PID 6497 (0x1961)
MPEG-2 Audio Elementary Stream PID 6498 (0x1962)
CA Entitlement Control Message PID 2411 (0x096b)

DICOVERY

MPEG-2 Video Elementary Stream PID 6449 (0x1931)
MPEG-2 Audio Elementary Stream PID 6450 (0x1932)
CA Entitlement Control Message PID 2408 (0x0968)

[ I'm afraid you will have to find the others out for yourself ]

There is a small bug in Joshyfun's offline decoder where it finishes processing instantly if you don't manually set the output folder each time.

If you have set PMCAM / Yankse up properly you shouldn't have any problems with decryption, [but make sure all EMM options are OFF in PMCAM]

Then use ProjectX to re-multiplex the A/V from the decrypted transport stream [ convert to M2P ], that’s it!


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

; )
 
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Thanks for the update!!!

Have to save the page to read through it slowly!!

chrome ;)
 
yeh I saw this on another site a while ago

be nice to test out and mess around with, but I have no CAM, no CARD, no CARD>SERIAL or anythin so I cant :(

re:satellite, all ya channels will be foreign and u wont understand em, and are there any good channels anyway :p
 
good info mate.. have the nokia 221t myself.. and the mrs uses it in the back room for red button.. gonna be hard to get it working for me.
 
A few more SECA2 Cardsharing tools for you to play with, I recommend NewCS:

NewCS Server:

[DLMURL]http://www.mpw.hu/dbw/newcs/newcs-1_RC2.zip[/DLMURL]

dreamboxworld.com

Gbox-x86 Server & Client:

http://rapidshare.de/files/5951318/GboXx86_for_Win32.zip.html

CWServer:

:: DVBSkyStar.com - Support for PC SAT Cards // SkyStar2, HDTV, DVB Software

MoscpheoTurbo 3, Server and Client:

[DLMURL]http://www.zackyfiles.com/files/MoscpheoTurbo_3_1_2.zip[/DLMURL]

[DLMURL]http://www.zackyfiles.com/files/OCX_Moscpheo.zip[/DLMURL]

MiniMAFI Season Client:

[DLMURL]http://www.zackyfiles.com/files/Mini_MAFI_beta21.zip[/DLMURL]

DNA's CryptoEmu:

[DLMURL]http://www.zackyfiles.com/files/Crypto_Emulator_v7_9.zip[/DLMURL]


I think that's enough to be going on with...

8 )
 
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@ Nick [D]vB

Will these kind of card sharing also work with satellitte systems using other forms of encryption ie Mediaguard, Nagravision etc?

chrome
 
yup, they were actually designed for satellite providers in the first place, but thanks to the DVB standard they also work for terrestrial and digital cable systems.
 
Has anyone set up cardshare for TUTV yet? I might give it a go if it works, build some program that connects to people willing to share cards, for exclusive use of here. (like the keygen). It wont be so easy for them to stop us doing that, they cant just take the channels off air. :)
 
I can confirm all these systems are working with TopUp, of course I've only tested them on my home network... ;)

Many cardserver programs already have grouping and redundancy systems, CardSpider creates a "web" of users for example.

Open cardsharing groups are risky at the moment because its easy to trance an IP address to an individual, you can use spoofing and IP tunnelling systems but they are very hard to configure.

The new incarnation of the "FreeNet" has a lot of possibilities for anonymous cardsharing, it would be practically impossible to trace users on there. Rather than leaving a server up 24/7 the "off-line" decryption system might be a safer option for individual programs.

The main problem is that satellite cardsharing groups are set up to share access to many different providers, but the UK will only ever have one pay-per-view terrestrial service and there is little point sharing the same content [or with UK cable users because their platform has been hacked for years].

But, if anyone needs any help setting things up I'd be glad to help,

Cheers,
Nick
 
Whats that about offline decryption? How does that work? Any way of getting it to work with a few microchips+things, instead of leaving pc on 24/7?

Im interested in this, but dont have a box with a slot yet (only get one for about £5, not replacing freeview box though).
 
There is a bit about off-line decryption in the guide, basically if you have a DVB-T card for your PC, or some types of set-top PVR, you can record TopUp programs encrypted and then decrypt them later when you have access to a smartcard [or a connection to a cardserver... ]

The smartcards are still secure so you will always need some sort of connection to a valid card at some point. More expensive versions of the season interface can connect through Blue-tooth / wireless / ethernet networks instead of a PC’s COM port. Some set-top decoders have modems / COM / ethernet connections that could be used to connect to a cardserver if there firmware was hacked.

I would try and get hold of an old OnDigital set-top box, or better still, a DVB-T PCI card. You should be able to pick one up on Ebay for about £10 these days. A box with a common interface slot for a CAM would be best because I haven't tested the season interface with embedded smartcard readers yet. Let me know if you want to give it a crack.

Cheers,
Nick
 
Does this guide tell me that if I set up c*rdsharing on my little dm500-t and insert my TUTV card I can connect my other DVB-T STBs (both with card slots and CI slots) with a season interface in each and not need another server PC?

Or do I need to read it again?
 
If you've got a DreamBox you can use it as the server but you still need something to connect the client decoder to [unless it's also a DreamBox].

Normally this would be a season interface connected to a PC but you might be able to connect a COM port season to the DreamBoxes COM port or an ethernet season / CV12 to its network port.

ethernetseason5vc.jpg


cv128bz.jpg


I have only tested season interfaces with the Aston 1.05 CAM but official TopUp CAMs should also work. Decoders with embedded smartcard readers might need a firmware hack to work, I know the Pace DTVA does.

It really depends if the satellite DreamBox cardservers / emulators work on the DM500-T, [there's no reason why not], are there any custom images available for it?
 
Nick [D]vB said:
If you've got a DreamBox you can use it as the server but you still need something to connect the client decoder to [unless it's also a DreamBox].
Normally this would be a season interface connected to a PC but you might be able to connect a COM port season to the DreamBoxes COM port or an ethernet season / CV12 to its network port.
ethernetseason5vc.jpg

cv128bz.jpg

I have only tested season interfaces with the Aston 1.05 CAM but official TopUp CAMs should also work. Decoders with embedded smartcard readers might need a firmware hack to work, I know the Pace DTVA does.
It really depends if the satellite DreamBox cardservers / emulators work on the DM500-T, [there's no reason why not], are there any custom images available for it?

There weren't last time I looked. Probably because DTT throughout Europe and Aus is FTA. Only in the UK do we end up having to pay for it.

I think that the custom images would work on the 500-T if it weren't for the fact that the UK uses QAM64 emulation and this is not written into the official image yet (or wasn't). The official image works on UK 500-Ts because anttist wrote a patch to allow the emulation. None of the other devs include this patch in their images and anttist won't modify a 3rd party image with his patch.

I do have a little Via Epia HTPC sitting next to my DTT STB's that I could use as a server but it has no TV card installed and is in a tiny case with no PC slots. I was waiting for the Nebula twin usb, but have read they want £160 for it and it's arrival is becoming a moveable feast. I think £160 is a touch rich.

I have another huge 3GHz HTPC that's only connected to the LAN with a wireless g card: I could shove some TV cards in there but it's nowhere near a TV RF socket. But wait, hang on a minute, if I am only using this server PC as a cardserver does it need to have a TV card installed? I know progdvb doesn't load if it can't find a TV card though..

Humour me a bit longer, I'll get a sudden dawning of comprehension if you drip feed me a bit more info.

Thanks BTW. :)

Any suggestions?
 
Another TopUp compatible sharing program....

New version of MoscpheoTurbo 3:

[DLMURL]http://www.zackyfiles.com/files/MoscpheoTurbo_3_1_2.zip[/DLMURL]

[DLMURL]http://www.zackyfiles.com/files/OCX_Moscpheo.zip[/DLMURL]


It's all in Spanish but it works great once you've worked out what the settings do! :D
 
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Clanzer's USB Season is now back in stock:

http://www.usbseason.co.uk/

BTW, I'm thinking about re-writing this guide if anyone is interested?

I've attatched some screenshots of my setup,

Cheers,
Nick
 
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