Digital Video Broadcasting

• Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) was originally created in 1993 to

provide a set of open and common technical mechanisms by which
digital television broadcasts can be delivered to consumers,
recognizing a range of television-based businesses.
• Some years later, much of that original objective has been achieved
and the DVB, as well as the world in which it operates, has advanced.
• The range of contents that DVB systems have to handle has expanded
beyond television. That content is increasingly being carried on non-
board networks and to non-TV devices.
• The connection between the transfer of data and the consumption of
the services is becoming less tightly coupled, due to storage and load
networking.
• As a result, DVB membership is expanding at an accelerating rate
with many organizations joining from well outside the original
charter, extending the scope both geographically as well as beyond the
core broadcast markets.
• For content providers, DVB systems compromise a system of pipes all
seamlessly connected, eventually delivering MPEG-2 bit streams to the
home.
• The bit streams may have been routed through satellite (DVB-S), cable
(DVB-C), and/or terrestrial (DVB-T) networks on the way. At the end of
this process, they can be easily decoded.
• With its advanced work on the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP),
which includes defining a common application programming interface
(API) for receivers of the future that will be capable of dealing with
many kinds of service and interactivity models, DVB is providing a
technical solution to the new, exciting, and uncharted territories of digital
media convergence.
• Using MPEG-2 as a stream of data containers labeled with full
addressing and processing instructions (in the form of DVB service
information), DVB provides the receiver at the other end of the pipe with
the location, network, broadcast, and program information it needs to
jump from one element of the multiplex to another and between
multiplexes without missing a beat, shifting gear to decode HDTV,
SDTV, data, and automatically setting the optimum system parameters.
• DVB is a transmission scheme based on the MPEG-2 video
compression/transmission scheme.
• DVB provides superior picture quality with the opportunity to view
pictures in standard format for wide screen (16 : 9) format, along with
mono, stereo, or surround sound.
• It also allows a range of new features and services including
subtitling, multiple audio tracks, interactive content, and multimedia
content, where, for instance, programs may be linked to World Wide
Web material.
• Satellite transmission has led the way in delivering digital TV to
viewers.
• A typical satellite channel has 36 MHz bandwidth, which may support
transmission at up to 35–40 Mbps using QPSK modulation.
• The video, audio, control data and user data are all formed into fixed-
sized MPEG-2 transport packets. The complete coding process may
be summarized by
• inverting every eighth synchronization byte
• scrambling the contents of each packet
• Reed–Solomon coding at 8 percent overhead
• interleaved convolutional coding (the level of coding ranges from 1/2
to 7/8 depending on the intended application)
• modulation using QPSK of the resulting bit stream.
 DVB Interoperabilities
• DVB is interoperable in two key senses. The first is between different
delivery media, where a maximum commonality between systems
allows problem-free transport of programs across the barriers between
different delivery media.
• For example, one of the key reasons for the successful implementation
of DVB-T receivers is that they share many of the same components
used in DVB-S and DVB-C receivers made by the same manufacturers
and installed in their millions of receivers across the world. This is
known as cross-medium interoperability.
• Secondly, all DVB equipment interoperates, which means that
equipment from many different manufacturers can be connected
together and will work.
• This allows the content provider, network operator, and service
provider to freely choose the best added value equipment
implementations from various manufacturers all the way through the
broadcast chain. This is known as cross-manufacturers interoperability.
• DVB’s work is carried out by members from all parts of the
broadcasting value chain and lately even members of the computer
industry have become active in the working groups of the project.
• This is a reflection of the natural process of convergence, which is a
consequence of the widespread digitization of all media.
• From DVB-T to DVB-S to DVB-C, the DVB system has been very
widely adopted.
DVB/ATSC System:
• The ATSC digital television standard describes a system designed to
transmit high quality video and audio as well as data over a single 6
MHz channel.
• The system can deliver, reliably, about 19 Mbps of throughput in a 6
MHz terrestrial broadcasting channel and about 38 Mbps of
throughput in a 6 MHz cable television channel.
• This means that encoding a video source whose resolution can be as
high as five times that of conventional television resolution requires a
bit rate reduction by a factor of 50 or higher.
• The objective is to maximize the information passed through the data
channel by minimizing the amount of data required to represent the
video image sequence and its associated audio.
• to represent the video, audio, and data sources with as few bits as
possible while preserving the level of quality required for the given
application.
DVB System:
• Owing to the use of MPEG-2 packets as data containers and the DVB
service information surrounding and identifying those packets, DVB can
deliver to the home almost anything that can be digitized, whether it is
high-definition TV, multiple channel standard definition TV, or
broadband multimedia data and interactive services.
• DVB has taken the transport stream (TS) structure from the digital
information to be modulated and broadcast.
• The content being broadcast is completely independent of the DVB
physical channel used as well as independent of the modulation and
coding used by each physical channel.
• This allows for a great degree of flexibility and interoperability among
Baseline System: The DVB video coding is based on the MPEG-2
specification and uses the various profiles and levels that allows for
different scan rates, different aspect ratios including 3 : 4, 16 : 9, or
2.21 : 1; selectable resolution including standard definition TV
(SDTV).
• DVB also accommodates transmission of 4 : 2 : 2 TV format for
contribution applications.
• The DVB audio coding is also based on MPEG-2 specification
allowing for multiple audio channels that are compatible with MPEG-
1.
Data: There are different modes for various types of data, from teletext,
subtitling or other vertical blanking interval data to the several
formats specified for data broadcasting such as data piping,
asynchronous data streaming, synchronous and synchronized data
streaming, multiprotocol encapsulation, data carousels and object
carousels.
System: The specification for service information (SI) is the glue for
interoperability among different services and delivery systems, cable,
terrestrial, microwave, or satellite.
Interactivity: Interactivity is accomplished by using network-independent
protocols for DVB interactive services through the various standards
defined by DVB for return channels including cable, terrestrial, and satellite.
Interfacing: Interfaces for the transport of MPEG transport stream through
conventional telecommunication systems such as pleosynchronous digital
hierarchy (PDH) or synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) have been also
defined. Also, means to convey asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) type of
data is considered under guidelines for handling ATM signals in DVB
systems.
Definition for interfacing networks at home are also standardized by the DVB
to take into account access to the home as well as digital local network at
home with the documents Home Access Network (HAN) and In-Home
Digital Network (IHDN) and Home Local Network (HLN).
The interfaces for integrated receiver decoder (IRD) are defined in the
Common Interface specification for conditional access and other digital
video broadcasting decoder applications as well as all other interfaces for