Video Asylum

RE: need a cable box expert

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This Post Has Been Edited by the Author

In Reply to: RE: need a cable box expert posted by Joe Murphy Jr on October 09, 2011 at 17:20:24

I've never opened up a cableTV STB, but based on what I've seen on CECBs and related chipsets, I'd say that you won't be able to disable the protections in a STB.

The major components in the CECB tuners for digital OTA are:

* a power supply (AC to DC converter)
* the RF tuner (the old-style tin can or modern solid-state IC)
* ATSC demodulator (8VBS for OTA, cableTV needs 64-QAM and/or 256-QAM)
* SoC
* RAM
* ROM (flash memory for the operating system and application firmware)

"SoC" is the acronym for "system on (a) chip". "System" means a computer (typically a 32-bit RISC) processor with peripheral devices. From some Broadcom and STMicro info, the SoCs used in the CECBs appear to be stripped-down, cost-reduced versions of fuller-featured chips suitable for a cableTV STB.

A modern STB is essentially a dedicated computer for processing MPEG transport streams, and decrypting them if necessary. All processing is performed in the digital domain whenever possible. The only analog signals would be RF that is input to the ATSC demodulator and the outputs for stereo audio and component/S-video/composite video.

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