Re:i wonder.. (Score 1)

The way Dish DVRs in general work is that they record the encrypted, compressed (and currently MPEG2, MPEG4 coming early next year) broadcast stream directly to the drive.

Then, every time it's played back, they decrypt it using a smartcard and hardware MPEG decoder just before outputting the video.

Are you 100% certain about this? If this were true then they could never do complete keychanges, there would always have to be a 'dvr' key which would unlock old content, and new content would have to include this key as well. Otherwise evertime the keys changed old content wouldn't work.

Hmm.. Checking the DishRip yahoo group there's no mention of Nagravision keys so I'm pretty sure you're off-base here. And really, it makes for a VERY complicated system the way you describe.