ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the main steps in the digital TV transmission and reception processes, which indicate the basics of the Integrated Receiver/Decoder (IRD) architecture. Video and audio signals of the programmes to be broadcast are each put through an MPEG-2 encoder which delivers the video and audio packetized elementary streams (PESs) to the multiplexer. These PESs are used by the multiplexer to form 188 byte transport packets, which are eventually scrambled, as well as the PAT, PMT, PSI and DVB-SI tables for the electronic program guide (EPG). The audio and video PES outputs from the demultiplexer are applied to the input of the MPEG block, which generally combines MPEG audio and video functions and the graphics controller functions required, among other things, for the EPG. MPEG-2 decoding generally requires at least 16 Mbits of DRAM.
