Page 156 - TELE-audiovision - The World’s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
Basic HTML Version
01-02/2013
■
156
TELE-audiovision International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 01-02/2013
—
Professional Software
for Analyzing, Recording
and Monitoring DVB, ATSC,
ISDB and DTMB
Transport
Streams
TEST REPORT
Analyse Software
TSReader
Best Software for Digital Transport
Stream Analysis
In the good old analog
days it was all much sim-
pler: the video and audio of
a channel were modulated
on one frequency and then
broadcast from one trans-
mitter or uplinked to a satel-
lite and then further distrib-
uted to the target areas.
Digital transmissions on
the other hand are much
more involved and complex
in that they could contain
as many as ten channels
depending on picture qual-
ity and in some cases even
more than that! On top of
that there are various audio
tracks, subtitles, EPG data
and let’s not forget the en-
cryption of the content. All
of this information must be
carried on one single fre-
quency in such a way that
the receiver on the other
end can correctly read and
process that data.
The digital transport
stream is a fairly complex
and confusing thing. Trans-
mitter and receiver can only
keep track of all the infor-
mation when it’s tagged with
its own PID (packet identi-
fier) number. For example,
Rod Hewitt developed the TSReader analysis software. We previously reported on his activities in
the 06-07-08/2012 edition of TELE-audiovision.
TV channel A is assigned
a video PID of 100 and an
audio PID of 101 while TV
channel B would get a video
PID of 200 and an audio PID
of 201, and so on. In addi-
tion to this data, the various
PID tables are also included
in the stream allowing the
receiver to find the correct
PIDs within the data stream
and associate them with the
right TV channel.
This is where TSReader
comes into play. It’s a soft-
ware tool designed exactly
for this situation. It’s avail-
able in three different ver-
sions (Lite, Standard and
Professional). Exactly what
the differences in functions
are between the two ver-
sions can be seen in our ta-
ble - all the different features
are listed in detail there. The
author of TSReader is Rod
Hewitt. We introduced him
to you in the 05-06/2012 is-
sue of TELE-audiovision with
a detailed report. The pro-
fessional version of TSRead-
er with all of its functions is
18MB in size. The hardware
requirements are not all that
high: an 800 MHz processor
to process SD streams and
a 2.5 GHz processor for HD
content are recommended
as are a graphics card and
