Rick's Notes
April 2004
2004/04/06
I was surprised when a friend said to me that I'd found a 'legitimate'
use for a hack to get the Sky pay-per-view movies for free.
So I looked this up.
What is required is my modification to tell the Digibox that the phone line is busy. That's
all.
How it works is that when you order a pay-per-view movie, the details are stored on your card and (unlike the old analogue system) you are granted the ability to watch the movie immediately. The box knows you've ordered the movie, it can contact Sky to settle the billing later. If you remember, ordering movies on analogue was a bit precarious as you had to stay tuned to a specific channel and sometimes the order code wouldn't get to your card in time.
Now if you hook up the always-busy modification, your Digibox will be unable to contact Sky to
send the billing information.
I understand that you can order up to four movies this way. The details are queued on your Sky
viewing card.
There is a caveat, and this is why it doesn't bother me to write this information here. The first is that you must always keep your box away from the phone line, else it'll send the details to Sky. Secondly, you cannot put any more pay-per-view movies on your card until you have cleared the list... by paying for them.
You might be able to coax Sky into clearing your list once by having the dog eat the card, but is it worth it? You might have a card replacement fee, you might have Sky refuse to reissue your card (they aren't stupid, you can't 'lose' your card once a fortnight).
All for, what, four movies that you don't want to pay for?
Jeez, if you want to see the movie that bad go watch it at the cinema like you're supposed to!
Sorry for the interruption to the service. When you search and replace
in the documents to make sure Digibox is uniformly spelled with a capital 'D', it is often rather useful to make extra-certain that you've not screwed up any file paths (like
/images/ricksworld/digibox) because the Unix-based server is just about anal enough to consider
"/digibox" and "/Digibox" to be two different things!
I guess I could symlink it so both point to the same thing, but I'm not smart enough to do that, and I'm too damn lazy to bother reading the manpage to find out how... :-)
Anyway, sorry.
It has been suggested that I list all of the channels available
on the Astra 19.2 birds.
Sorry, but I don't see any point considering Lyngsat maintains a very impressive and very
detailed list that is kept up-to-date - refer to the list for Astra birds at 19°E at http://www.lyngsat.com/19east.html.
My good friend does have a point though, there are loads of extra channels that I have not described - there are some 40 French radio stations, probably 60-odd German channels, and more Spanish ones all broadcast in the clear on Astra 19.2. The ones shown in my channels listing are my personal selection.
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