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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting! Over in the UK we had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCrypt
https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/reports/1995-11.pdf
An ancient Easter egg is revealed at the end of this interesting article. The "all free" code was `1337` or "leet" in leet!
Not quite. The T is silent.
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.
[2020]