A DVB Primer

You just got your TV, possibly with a set-top box from your provider, plugged it in, and things just worked. With the digital broadcast revolution, things got a bit more complex, with acronyms such as DVB, ATSC, STB, EPG, TS, MUX, PSI, CSP, CAM, MPEG-2, H.264, AC3 and much more being the name of the game.The DVB standard is widely adopted in Europe, Australia, South Africa, India, while most Asian, African and many South American countries use it for cable and satellite only. Canada, Mexico and South Korea, while adopting DVB for cable and satellite transmissions, have adopted the ATSC standard for digital terrestrial transmissions. ATSC is another digital broadcasting standard adopted widely in the United States for all types of digital broadcasts. With the aid of error detection and correction data stored within the signal itself, a DVB signal is more robust to noise, and hence does not suffer interference in the same way that an analog signal does. Furthermore, its digital nature assures that the quality of the picture being transmitted does not deteriorate due to electromagnetic noise introduced from the transmitting station to the receiving entity (e.g. a set-top box)The purpose of this article is to introduce the newcomer to the world of digital broadcast and straighten out some of the basic terminology. . Due to the nature of the different media, there are slight variations in the TS when originating from the various sources, which are defined by three standards: DVB-S for satellite, DVB-C for cable and DVB-T for digital terrestrial. When purchasing a set-top box or a PCI/USB card for your computer, you have to decide for which medium you need it. This is because the hardware will still consist of an analog tuner that works quite differently for each of the three types of media. One has to keeYou will see that it is not so complex after all!