Digital Television

Overview

Digital TV changed the way we watch television! The technology offers TV with movie-quality picture and CD-quality sound, along with a variety of other enhancements. It provides a more efficient way to deliver TV than with analogue transmissions and enables the same services to be delivered in less bandwidth with greater clarity.

Through the course you will gain a complete insight into the world of digital television, going from the old black-and-white television to the high-definition TV with H.264/AVC compression.

What can you expect?

• Achieve a comprehensive understanding of the basic architecture of analogue and digital TV.
• Understand the most important principles used in video and audio compression techniques.

Content

PART 1: INTRODUCTION

• What is TV? Who are the content owners? Who are the players and what are their business cases?

PART 2: OPERATION OF EYE AND EAR

• General information of how people observe sound and vision.

PART 3: ANALOGUE TV

• From the studio to the living room.

PART 4: FROM ANALOGUE TO DIGITAL TV

• What are the reasons to go from analogue to digital television? How is an analogue signal digitalized: sample (4:4:4, 4:2:0, ...) and bit rates, SDI.

PART 5: COMPRESSION OF DIGITAL SIGNALS

• Digital Video Compression: MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and H264.
• Digital Audio Compression: MPEG-1 layer 1, MPEG-1 layer 2, MPEG-1 layer 3, AAC, ...; Dolby.
• Metadata: What is metadata? Why is it used? Introduction to MPEG-7.

PART 6: TRANSMISSION OF DIGITAL TV

• MPEG-2 Transport Protocol: Single and multi programme transport stream, PSI, SI.
• Transport Mechanisms: Transmission standards for physical layer: DVB-C, DVB-T, DVB-S, DVB-S2, DVB-H; encapsulation specifications for transport of MPEG-2 packets over ATM or IP (UDP/IP, RTP/UDP/IP), DVB-IPI.

PART 7: MIDDLEWARE

• What is middleware? Which specifications are used? Principle of carousels for broadcast of applications.

PART 8: TV DELIVERY

• Broadcast TV, Pay TV, Video On Demand, PVR, Video Telephony, DVB-H, FTTx.

PART 9: MPEG-21 THE FUTURE?

• What does it cover: a short introduction.

Prerequisites

Basic understanding of data communication and IP.