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While experiments at Large Hadron Collider are frozen till spring, I’ve got into my own experiment: setting a record on continuous video recording.

Today my MGM TV channel subscription had to expire. I decided to leave a remembrance of the channel by recording a night’s worth of movies.

I’ve set up VirtualDub to capture PAL video stream 720×576 from Composite video and encode it real-time in DivX (1-pass quality-based, quantizer 4) 576×464 @25fps deinterlaced with 48kHz 16bit audio in MP3 @192kbps.

To my surprise, the TV subscription did not end. (Or the “end” doesn’t come into effect until after a user flips channels away from expired ones? It’s DVB-C Conax.) Anyway, I thought, fine, let it record until HDD’s full.

So far 12 full hours of video has been recorded, file size 7.6 GB.

Looks like I’ve got a day-off from news – cannot switch channels!

UPDATE

After 21 hours and 16 minutes into recording the STB displayed a message

Scrambled Channel
Smart card not paired

and refused to show the channel again. All other channels continued to work just fine!

Re-inserting the card didn’t help. It took as much as cold STB restart to restore this one channel.

Do they care I watch only my single favourite channel as long as I pay for the whole pack?
Or is this a kind of protection against small illegal re-broadcasters?

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