I had a TV capture card in my computer and a little program that could in a sense decode the signal. However it wasn’t very good at it. It had hotkeys to fiddle with the parameters, because a lot of them weren’t constant in the encoding, but varied over time. This meant readjusting them all the time, otherwise it would lose tracking and get messed up. The colors would also invert every 30 secs or so, so you would need to hit a hot key to toggle that. Also there was no sound, the encoded TV stations used a digital sound track instead of the regular analog one, and nobody had figured out how to decode that. And because computers weren’t that fast back then (I had a Celeron 300A running at 500mhz), the resolution was only half what the signal was. The signal was 480i, which got turned into a 240p image. Which at double the pixel size was still a very small image.
But it was kinda neat it could at least decode some of it and boobs could definitely be seen :)
Funny how that’s 25 years ago, it feels like it wasn’t that long at all.
We had something similar in Germany but apparently the “encryption” was much worse. The audio was unencrypted and the image was complete with just the lines being jumbled around. So if you had a key file with the correct order for the lines and a capture card you could watch it for free.
They had all the new movies earlier than other TV channels and some porn at night. As far as I recall I only used it to watch one movie. Not One Less. A great Chinese movie about a substitute teacher in a poor rural town fighting to get a kid who left to work in the city back to school.
Ah, Celerons and the heyday of overclocking. I think I had a 266@400, 300A@500, and a dual socket motherboard with two 350s@550 or something like that. Experimental multithreading in Quake 3! I was in college and constantly working on my computer.
For all you “kids these days,” imagine you got a new high end CPU that had a max boost clock of 6GHz. You go into the BIOS and say “How about we make that 9Ghz instead?” The CPU is just like “bet” and runs at that speed kicking ass for years without issue.
I had a TV capture card in my computer and a little program that could in a sense decode the signal. However it wasn’t very good at it. It had hotkeys to fiddle with the parameters, because a lot of them weren’t constant in the encoding, but varied over time. This meant readjusting them all the time, otherwise it would lose tracking and get messed up. The colors would also invert every 30 secs or so, so you would need to hit a hot key to toggle that. Also there was no sound, the encoded TV stations used a digital sound track instead of the regular analog one, and nobody had figured out how to decode that. And because computers weren’t that fast back then (I had a Celeron 300A running at 500mhz), the resolution was only half what the signal was. The signal was 480i, which got turned into a 240p image. Which at double the pixel size was still a very small image.
But it was kinda neat it could at least decode some of it and boobs could definitely be seen :) Funny how that’s 25 years ago, it feels like it wasn’t that long at all.
We had something similar in Germany but apparently the “encryption” was much worse. The audio was unencrypted and the image was complete with just the lines being jumbled around. So if you had a key file with the correct order for the lines and a capture card you could watch it for free.
They had all the new movies earlier than other TV channels and some porn at night. As far as I recall I only used it to watch one movie. Not One Less. A great Chinese movie about a substitute teacher in a poor rural town fighting to get a kid who left to work in the city back to school.
Ah, Celerons and the heyday of overclocking. I think I had a 266@400, 300A@500, and a dual socket motherboard with two 350s@550 or something like that. Experimental multithreading in Quake 3! I was in college and constantly working on my computer.
For all you “kids these days,” imagine you got a new high end CPU that had a max boost clock of 6GHz. You go into the BIOS and say “How about we make that 9Ghz instead?” The CPU is just like “bet” and runs at that speed kicking ass for years without issue.