[mili]

I believe that Dish is currently working on switching all their channels from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 to reduce the bandwidth requirements for HDTV. As we all know, almost all channels will be broadcasting in HDTV within 3-4 years. I don't think that FTA receivers support the MPEG-4 transport stream. So that would resolve that problem in the long term. As for this whole FTA fiasco, practically all FTA receivers are coming from Asia. FTA manufacturers want to boost their sales (especially in North America) because there is not much interest in watching free channels. Echostar was foolish enough to use the well known MPEG-2 transport stream which coincedentally enough is used by all the FTA manufacturers. DTV was smart enough to use their own propriatery transport stream so they cannot be targeted by FTA. I am now confident that Nagra 2 was compromised by one of the FTA manufacturers in a lab somewhere. Certainly those manufacturers have the resources to reverse-engineer such a card and then sell a perfectly legal product that can be re-flashed by testers to pickup echo signals. Remember how quickly all this happened? Card Coders people were COMPLETELY in the dark about Nagra 2 until about September this year. In fact, the only thing being discussed by CC people was the receiver firmware and the session key - issues specific to IRDs and not cards. Then overnight the decryption keys and full nagra 2 dumps start appearing in Europe and N. America. And then within days, FTA receivers are working. Come on now, it takes time for someone to write code to make those receivers work after you know the keys and such. So they (FTA manufacturers) probably had everything ready and just wanted to cover their tracks by releasing the info all over the internet. Expect legal action against these FTA manufacturers, but it will be a case of "he said - she said".

On another note, I am told the reason for the freezing for the AVR-X cards has now been found and will be addressed in 1.0.5 which will also auto roll (finally) and work on 301.010 receivers (yipee). I am told the release date is the 15th but if it is the 16th I won't complain too loud.

mili