Customer Reviews

Data Broadcasting: Understanding the ATSC Data Broadcast Standard

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I found this book to be a great resource for the engineering and design fundamentals that relate to the question "how is all that data formatted and organized in digital television broadcasting?" The MPEG-2 Systems Standard is one of the foundations of digital television. If you're interested in how MPEG-2 really works at the system level, you'll find this book an excellent resource. The chapter on MPEG Transport by itself is worth the price of the book, but it also does a great job explaining another arcane MPEG-2 Standard, Digital Storage Media Command and Control (DSM-CC). It turns out DSM-CC is very useful in data broadcasting, but if you were to pick up the IEC standard itself and try to make sense of it, you'd find it very challenging.

Even though broadcasters have not started transmitting data along with digital television, this book sets the framework for understanding how it will be done. It's written by those experts in the field who actually designed the standard, so you know the information is accurate.

I highly recommend this book to all those who develop or maintain data broadcasting systems.

The good point is that it is not at all a replication of the specification (though a true copy of the A/90 spec is added as an appendix). The concepts are clear, progressive and sufficiently illustrated.

Chapter 3 alone tells you most you need to know about MPEG-2 Systems standard. I gained extra insight from it even after I had studied the original 13818-1 spec.

This book, written by several of data broadcast specification authors, is The Definitive Work on the ATSC Data Broadcast specification.

If you are an implementer of data broadcasting, you need exactly two things: a copy of the specification and a copy of this book.