![]() The $10-a-month Premium plan has no ads (except for live TV), gives you access to additional sports and your local CBS channel, and allows you to download shows and movies. The $5-a-month Essential plan gives you access to Paramount Plus shows and movies with limited commercials, as well as NFL on CBS, top soccer games including the upcoming Champions League final and CBS live news. haven’t figured out the drill for the longer ones yet - are these guys are lazy or what? My advice: give up, be a consumer, and let the damn box to do it for you.There are two different plans to choose from - Essential or Premium - and the code works for either version. NOTE: This only works for VCR Plus+ numbers up to six digits long. The result, take my word for it, is a 2 hour show on channel 4 at 9 PM on May 10, 1991. Rearrange other bits from the first two binary numbers according to the aforesaid formula to get still another binary number use this as an index to a table that gives start times and durations of shows. (REMEMBER, THIS WAS YOUR IDEA.) Rearrange certain bits from the two binary numbers previously described according to a specified formula to make a new binary number, add 1 to get the channel. Take the remainder from Step 2, the month plus one times the day (that’s why the codes change each month), and the “offset” (never mind) and add them modulo 32 convert the result to binary. You perform this incredibly complicated routine involving numerous sums, products, and quotients plus a double-barreled dose of modular arithmetic, squeeze the result through an if-then sieve based on the number of digits, do some more sums and products, and convert the result to binary. Take the remaining digit (8), and … ah, it’s hopeless to explain in detail. This gives us the day of the month, 10.ģ. Take the last three digits (296), subtract 1, divide the result by 32, add 1 to the quotient. Truncate this to the same number of digits in 3316 (four), i.e., 8296. (No-carry multiply means to do regular multiplication except you discard all carries.) This gives us 82324978296.Ģ. “No-carry” multiply 3316 by the magic decoding key 68150631. Start with the code number 3316 from May, 1991. Here’s how it worked, based on the Cryptologia article:ġ. It seems to have become scarce of late, perhaps because VCR Plus+’s lawyers have been on the case. Somebody else used this as the basis for a VCR Plus+ encoding/decoding program called VCRPLS.ZIP that for a time was posted on computer bulletin boards and such. ![]() Three of them, Ken Shirriff, Curt Welch, and Andrew Kinsman, got together via the Internet computer network, broke the code (most of it, anyway), and published the result in the journal Cryptologia last July. ![]() Since the codes are encrypted, competitors can’t bootleg the boxes and newspapers can’t figure out the codes on their own.īut Gemstar didn’t reckon with the nation’s tireless computer geniuses. Gemstar is cagey about its business strategy, but presumably profits from VCR Plus+ in two ways: by selling the control box to you and the TV listing codes to newspapers. VCR Plus+ can even record shows on two different cable channels when you’re not home, something a VCR alone can’t do. At the right time VCR Plus+ beams out the proper pulses to turn on the VCR, switch to the right channel, start recording, then shut the VCR off when the show is over. You punch in the number(s) for the programs(s) you want to record, put a blank tape in the VCR, and leave the VCR Plus+ box pointed at the TV. The VCR Plus+ control box, which is sold by Gemstar Development, can be set up to emulate the remote controls for your VCR and/or cable box. Either way we are stretching the limit of what human ingenuity can accomplish in a 600-word column. ![]() Maybe you’d also like to know how to perform brain surgery with a can opener. But no, I can see you want to know what the algorithm is. If we had any sense we would leave it at that.
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