To be able to enjoy TV content of paid satellite providers, you need a subscription with them. This will comes in a form of an official Smart Card. You put this card on your digital receiver box with the smart card reader feature and wallah! channels get descrambled. Now what if you could use this card to supply multiple digital satellite boxes?
Cardsharing makes it possible to have multiple clients supplied with the same content by using one card and that`s why we call it Cardsharing, Simply because you share a card between multiple digital satellite receivers. That is all you need to know about cardsharing if you are a normal end-user, this article is meant to be simple and empty of any words or phrases which may cause you a headache. Let`s understand some basic terms about cardsharing which may come useful when you want to subscribe to a provider, installing your service, facing an issue or explaining the issue to your provider so he could understand, diagnose and resolve the issue:
-Digital Receiver Box/Sat Box/Box: You are most likely familiar with these terms, which are all the same by the way, and have worked with at least one of them. You probably have one special make and model as your favorite. Some of the are Closed Source like Skybox, Openbox, early version of Technomate, Spiderbox or any of those cheap chinese ones. Others are Open Source Linux Based like Dreambox, VU+, new enigma 2 version of Technomate, Gigablue and so on.
-CCCam: Conditional Card Access Module is basically and emulator which receives the decrypted Code Word from the card which is hacked, decrypted and shared by your provider. When you have CCCam emulator on your box plus full internet access provided, the moment you change to an encrypted channel, the box is being ask for a deciphered code word which is called ECM. Then your CCCam emulator sends the request to the provider of whom you have an account installed and after your request is replied by a valid ECM, that scrambled channel gets going. How to`s regarding CCCAM installation on boxes (closed or open source) will be provided.
-OSCAM: Is probably the best thing ever happened to cardsharing, and that is no joke! Yeah this thing is serious. You can probably write books about it. Multi tabs, different aspects of different protocols for different DVB Security systems. Let`s say every card holder emulates their card via OSCAM. Many new high-tech receiver boxes like VU+ 4k work only with OSCAM if you want to run your cardsharing account on it. There will be extensive guides on how to use OSCAM in future articles.
-ECM: Entitlement Control Message which normal has a 64bit code needed to unscramble a channel. It has a limited living time meaning there is an interval between the ECM`s being generated by the card. For instance Sky NDS cards generate ecm`s every 8 seconds and if the box fails to get the next ecm in time, you`ll see that failure in a form of freezing.
-CAID: is Card ID. It doesnt concern end-users to know this but some people who try to get a line as for re-sharing to their own clients (meaning they are providers themselves but they want to get a re-share line from another provider who has a better feed for a specific package) or for some reason they need basic technical info of the package they try to work with, it is better to know about CAID. Every type of card has a specific security and each security system comes with different CAID`s but they usually look a like in first two digits. Each CAID has 4 digits. Now let`s review some of the common CAID`s and security systems. Below are the security system name, packages which are using it and a 4 digit CAID number:
--NDS: Used by Sky UK(0963,0960), Sky Italia(09CD), Sky Germany(098C,09C4,098E), Viasat Norway(090F,090E) .... As you can see NDS has 09xx common.
--SECA: Used by NC+ Poland(0100:000068), Canalsat France(0100:003311,003315) .... SECA system has the caid fixed but the second part which is called Provider ID changes.
--NAGRAVISION: Used BY Polsat Poland(1803), Virgin Media UK(1841), Meo Portugal(1814), HD+ Germany(1830,1843), Sky Germany(1833) .... and here Nagra has 18xx common
--VIACCESS: Polsat Poland, Many Adult channels, MTV package, Canal+ France, Bein Sport Arabia .... (0500) VIACCESS is the busiest of all and just like SECA CAID is fixed and Provider ID changes.
--CONAX: C More Nordic, Antiksat Slovakia, DigitalB Albania(0B00), NC+ (0B01) .... and here 0Bxx is fixed 2 digits for Conax.
These are the top 5 DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) Security Systems.
-ECM Time: If you bring up the channel info, right where the CCCam info of that channel are shown, you`ll see a time in milliseconds. Different Security systems have different tolerance for high ecm`s. For instance, if you are watching a channel from Sky Germany through satellite, then you are using NDS ecm`s as current cards used by Sky DE have CAID 098C. NDS cards tolerate and ECM delay up to 550 milliseconds. This delay can not and will not be lower than 50 because it is virtually impossible. It is produced by the delay from the physical card location where it is being bypassed and deciphered >> to the provider`s server >> to the client. So in simple words, ECM time is a delay that takes the ECM to travel from the card to your box. Other systems like Nagra Vision or Seca have much more tolerance that if the ecm time goes over 2000ms, you would still have a clean picture.
-Line/Cline/Nline: Lines are the format in which cardsharing accounts are presented. So using terms like "Files", "strings" or "Documents" are wrong. Lets see why they are called this way:
--Cline: a cline is a line which starts with C: and it has the format like below:
C: server port username password
so a CCCam Cline would look like this:
C: s1.domain.com 34567 username22 password33
At the above example "s1.domain.com" is your server, "34567" is the port number, "username22" is the username and "password33" is your password. Sometimes you might see Clines which have an IP address instead of a dns address like 192.168.1.2 but still they are the same because at the end s1.domain.com itself is going to point to an IP address.
--Nline: While Cline is directly a CCCAM protocol, Nline is a Newcamd protocol which is mostly used to link two cardsharing servers communicating. Another thing is Nline can carry one CAID while Cline can carry unlimited CAID`s and thats why end-users are provided by Clines as Cardsharing providers supply their clients with vast number of packages which of course have different CAID`s (cards).
-CCCam.cfg file: It is a .cfg configuration file in which C or N lines are stored and then imported to the satellite box. Importing procedure is different on Open and Closed source boxes. Future articles will cover this too.
-Prio File: Prio is short for Priority. This file contains commands of Prioritizing or Ignoring CAID`s. Why?! let`s make an example:
Say your provider has Mediaset Premium Italia. This package works with two CAID`s 1804 and 1805 but your provider source for 1805 is perfect while 1804 is weak on their system and if a client box works with it, freezing will ruin the quality. Therefore, if the provider is a pro, client will be provided by a prio file to be placed on the box in which there is the following command:
P: 1805:000000
I: 1804:000000
This means Ignore 1804 and Prioritize 1805. Other packages(cards) can be treated the same if necessary. This is done usually to the packages which have multiple Cards and the provider tends to have clients rely on one of them for better quality.
Ok, This is enough to get you going, but still if you think this article is missing any basic guides, just let us know in the comment section.
Any questions? post it on WDS Community Forum and let us help you.