Mobile DTV on the cheap

[Robert Stratton]

For folks who are at all interested in the ongoing trials of ATSC-M/H mobile TV in the U.S., I have happened upon a neat little tool. For serious examination of DVB-S or ATSC bitstreams, I like a piece of software called TSreader, but I was frustrated that there were lower bitrate streams out there for the watching that I couldn't see yet. 

There's not a lot of receiver hardware in the market yet for ATSC-M/H, which is an IP-encapsulated stream that's rather easily piggybacked onto existing ATSC broadcast infrastructure. ATSC-M/H is supposed to be manageable enough to process that it would work in a vehicle in motion. (That's what the documents all say, I'll defer to Terry as to how true that really is.)

It turns out that it's pretty straightforward to use a "legacy" (We're already using that word for this technology?) ATSC USB dongle or PCI card to watch the ATSC-M/H streams if you have software to unpack and something like VLC to render them. I found some for the MS Windows world for $11.99 at http://www.mobile-dtv-viewer.com  

It works well with the receiver I heard about for $17.95 on eBay 
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280566495021

The company's main business is selling signal analysis software for ATSC and DVB but I think they realized that this was a useful little hack and that people might even pay for it. 

If you want to really tear apart digital TV protocols and send video to other things for rendering, then I'd still recommend TSreader unreservedly.There are several versions depending on whether you need certain bells and whistles, but the author has been maintaining it diligently for years and is responsive if here's a problem. It supports more hardware than I care to think about, including things like commercial satellite receivers.  It's at http://www.tsreader.com/tsreader/index.html   Rod, the author also has a rather nice technical page on North American MPEG-2 details at http://www.tsreader.com/legacy/

Have fun,
--Bob