[HN Gopher] Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)
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Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)
Author : adunk
Score : 158 points
Date : 2026-04-25 11:10 UTC (20 hours ago)
HTML web link (fabiensanglard.net)
TEXT w3m dump (fabiensanglard.net)
| dtagames wrote:
| An ancient Easter egg is revealed at the end of this interesting
| article. The "all free" code was `1337` or "leet" in leet!
| tclancy wrote:
| Not quite. The T is silent.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Interesting! Over in the UK we had
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCrypt
|
| https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/reports/1995-11.pdf
| kotaKat wrote:
| _Asking for "TBA 970" delay chips in electronic stores prompted
| employees to offer the full list required to build a "decodeur
| pirate"_
|
| Good ol' civil disobedience. Love it.
| breakingcups wrote:
| [2020]
| eloisant wrote:
| My father was in electronics and schematics of pirate decoders
| were being passed around between friends/colleagues (this was
| before the web!) He got the schematics and built one.
|
| Later in the 90's, when TV cards became cheap enough I got one
| for my computer then there were software to decode the signal.
| charles_f wrote:
| If you had enough motivation, you could learn to decode the
| picture by squinting, and understand the audio by enough
| exposure. That came very handy to many a teenager on late
| Saturday evenings.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Or supposedly you could shake a strainer in front of your eyes.
|
| Still supposedly, the hardest part was finding the strainer in
| the kitchen without waking everyone in the house.
|
| And the saddest part was discovering that it didn't work.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > That came very handy to many a teenager on late Saturday
| evenings.
|
| GP is referring to Canal+ who'd play that one weekly porn movie
| on saturday evening.
|
| Us kids from the eighties could watch like 30 seconds
| unencrypted, than the scrambling would start.
|
| We'd still watch the movie ; )
| koolba wrote:
| > GP is referring to Canal+ who'd play that one weekly porn
| movie on saturday evening.
|
| As an Anglophone it counts as taking a 1-credit foreign
| language class.
| amiga386 wrote:
| In the UK we had the Red Triangle:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_triangle_(Channel_4) where
| we stayed up late for the hope of some sexy fun times, and we
| were exposed to culture and not nearly as much nudity as we
| had hoped for.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| Where I lived the paytv encryption just removed the sync
| signals and audio and by finetuning the TV you could get a
| fairly clean black and white picture. It sounds similar to
| Discret 11 but it wasn't quite the same.
|
| Only with a major scene change (eg day to night) this would
| need retuning. And this type of content didn't really do
| that, as most of these movies take place in the same bedroom
| :) so it was not a bad way to watch it.
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| I had friends who recorder the stream on VHS, thinking they
| could decoded it later by borrowing a decoder. Reportedly, it
| did not work.
| kangs wrote:
| When i was a kid, my dad had a Mac with the A/V PAL-SECAM cards.
| Hooked up a make-shift copper wire antenna and wrote a decoder
| with the free codewarrior cd folks gave me at Paris' Mac
| convention (we were 12 and crazy I guess). Good opportunity to
| learn powerplant and c/c++.
|
| I ended up brute forcing most of it as I did not really
| understand what I was doing, but it turns out, with enough time,
| you get things going.
|
| Wish the pages were still up, I lost that software long ago, and
| I'm sure my code was garbage (not that its much better today, but
| at least I can blame Claude..) and fun to read.
|
| The 90's were fun.
| athrow wrote:
| In Poland Canal+ was encrypted like this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z83bIGiRVy4
|
| I'm guessing it's a latter version?
| jtarrio wrote:
| Yeah, that's the Nagravision that the article mentions at the
| end.
|
| There were programs that could use a TV capture card and decode
| it in real time on a 486DX2. They worked pretty well (I felt ok
| using it because we already had Canal+ but it was on the living
| room TV and my computer was on the opposite side of the house.)
| septune wrote:
| "meuh meuh TV" was a famous one
| time4tea wrote:
| Super interesting article.
|
| Didn't operate for long? 1984-1995 - its long enough. Still
| remember seeing those scrambled programs in France.
|
| At the time in UK, lets say 87-92, the concept of paid tv over
| the air was incredible. Satellite existed, but wasn't very
| prevalent.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| > Piracy became rampant. Asking for "TBA 970" delay chips in
| electronic stores prompted employees to offer the full list
| required to build a "decodeur pirate". The encryption system was
| updated to Nagravision encryption in 1992 and Discret 11 was
| retired by 1995.
|
| We had one in the house. Very cheap and easy to get from north
| africa. Upgraded encryption was quickly matched with upgraded
| piracy. Then canalsat came along and you needed a memory card to
| keep your pirating hardware up to date, but it was still ok.
|
| Now I don't watch TV, and DRM in browser doesn't seem to have
| been broken the same way.
|
| But it doesn't matter because things like stremio give you the
| catalogs of all streaming services for free.
|
| Seems like piracy never dies.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| > Seems like piracy never dies.
|
| No I don't think it ever will.
|
| A recent threat is the 'for your safety' bullshit like
| attestation, combined with closed down OSes like on mobile. But
| people will always find ways around.
| dtsykunov wrote:
| The canal+ bumper jingle mentioned in the article goes incredibly
| hard. It's a shame we don't see anything like this on modern big
| tv.
|
| https://fabiensanglard.net/discret11/jingle_clear.mp4
| anthk wrote:
| The Spanish version was even more amazing and retro-futuristic,
| kinda like a paradoxical tune:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZHzMbFXAcM
|
| The one for Spain was the 2nd one.
| tormeh wrote:
| The (current, I believe) BBC News jingle is a real banger.
| esskay wrote:
| for anyone out of the loop:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQNCCn5zIEM
| gjvc wrote:
| it's got nothing on
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_nk8PzL0Zw
| anthk wrote:
| Spaniard there. We didn't need C+ for anime as local regions with
| languages distinct to Spanish got original DB and several more
| animes (Captain Tsubasa, easy choice for Europe), Doraemon et
| all.
|
| In the 90's only the poshy people or university students (and OFC
| bars for soccer matches) could afford the monthly subscription.
| That was true until the mid-late 90's where cheap Avermedia TV
| tuners for PC (and Pentium MMX processors) could decode the
| nagravision streams for the cheap. And, yes, they mainly were
| used for porn and soccer matches, and some Hollywood
| blockbusters.
|
| That died in from 2002/3 where cheap broadband was found
| everywhere and peple used P2P platforms like crazy.
|
| Under GNU/Linux I remember XawTV-Nagra and Alevt for Teletext.
|
| EDIT: it was XDtv, not XawTV. Good times, and often it was more
| interesting to decode stuff than actually watch it.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Most Animes in France were on TF1, not on canal+.
| Orphis wrote:
| Canal+ had a few animes not suited for kids and a few others
| that didn't really fit the catalog from TF1 or TMC (which was
| mostly available south of France). Those 2 had volume, Canal+
| had more "quality" ones.
|
| I remember watching Akira, some DBZ movies, Evangelion,
| Vision of Escaflowne, Armitage III and many others!
| ritonlajoie wrote:
| Good memories on the #secafrance irc channel getting the update
| codes from time to time to reprogram the home made security cards
| for official 'decodeurs'
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(page generated 2026-04-26 08:01 UTC)