Does anyone have any info on Oak Orion Scrambling

[paul92]

Hi, We are a group of enthusiasts, we are trying to build a scrambler & descrambler, which will ultimately resurrect old decoders, and allow use of them around the house to scramble, and descramble one's own content.

In Europe, the decoder most commonly used was the Comcrypt 4000, and was used in many countries like Egypt to decode Cinema+ , in Greece to decode Filmnet, in Italy to decode Tele+, in Holland to decode Canal+, in Sri lanka to decode HBO,sinamax.,Hallmark,star spots,ESPN,MTV,B4U,MCM,HBO ADULT NETWORK and Plus 21, and in South Africa was used for M-Net.



If anyone has valuable info, such as command sent, or anything that they think may of value, please they they make themselves known


Thanks so much.

[betwixt]

I can't help with design but if my memory serves me well, those boxes used a simple to implement but difficult to crack encryption/decryption system. The idea was to digitize the video and sometimes the sound, store it in a memory IC in consecutive memory addresses then play it back with the memory addresses randomized. The effect was to show each line of the picture chopped into small lengths then rearranged out of order during encryption and replaced back in the right order by decryption. I'm not sure how the seed for the random address scrambling was sent, some systems must have used a seed partially transmitted and partially from subscription card slotted into the decoder. What made it difficult to crack was that any invalid seed produced an equally un-viewable but different scrambled picture. It was impossible to 'home in' on the correct seed number, it had to be correct or none of the picture or sound decoded properly.
Brian.