Application of MPEG2 in the receiver

Digital broadcasting of video requires an order of magnitude increase in the complexity of the domestic receiver. Conventional analogue receivers incorporate some rudimentary digital control and on-screen display functions, but are otherwise a simple analogue signal chain. The packet-based protocol layers of MPEG2 wrapped around the compressed video data must be successively stripped away by the receiver using dedicated LSI devices or high-speed embedded RISC processors. In addition to the processing involved; compressed data must be buffered within the receiver to meet the MPEG2 specification and to account for the limitations of a real decoder. Domestic receivers for digital TV reception form two distinct groups: (i) PC-architecture based; (ii) dedicated receiver. The first group has been popular for video on demand (VOD) and other interactive service trials. The second group, dedicated domestic digital receivers, are entering volume production to meet the introduction of satellite services based on MPEG2 coding. The paper concentrates on some of the design issues for the dedicated receiver as the first large-scale use of MPEG2