What is DigiCipher 2?

DigiCipher 2 (DCII): proprietary standard format (General Instrument -> Motorola -> Google -> Arris) of digital signal transmission and encryption with MPEG-2/MPEG-4 signal video compression used on many communications satellite television and audio signals 

The DCII standard is incompatible with the DVB standard.

The primary difference between DigiCipher 2 and DVB lies in how each standard handles SI metadata, 

DigiCipher 2 also extends the MPEG program number that is assigned for each service in a transport stream with the concept of a virtual channel number, whereas the DVB system never defined this type of remapping preferring to use a registry of network identifiers to further differentiate program numbers from those used in other transport streams. 

Also unlike DVB, all text used in descriptors can be compressed using standard Huffman coding which saves on broadcast bandwidth and loading times.

Approximately 70% of newer first-generation digital cable networks in North America use the DigiCipher 2 format. The use of DCII is most prevalent in North American digital cable television set top boxes.