Summary of a project (part 1)

During my 3^rd year at the University of Wales, Swansea I undertook a project to create a system for allowing one computer hosting digital radio (DAB) and digital TV (DVB-T) to share anywhere from about 1 to 8 TV or radio channels between multiple network clients. The project was long and difficult and much of the polish I wanted to give it never happened, but during that time I did manage to achieve the aim, something I don’t think had been done in that way before. What I was doing was exploiting one of the key generally unrecognised benefits of digital technology. Many people know that with digital radio and TV that you generally get more services than you did under the old analogue system but not many people know why. This is because not only is the data compressed to reduce the amount of bandwidth required but it is also multiplexed so that it can be transmitted in roughly the same space that a single analogue channel requires. It is this process of multiplexing that interested me, as I discovered when you receive a digital service your hardware isn’t just receiving a single channel it’s receiving a multiplex containing several channels, only your hardware is discarding all but the one you are accessing. I felt that this process of discarding data was wasteful and thought that in a home, office or other environment where there could be several networked computers that situations would arise where two people may want to access different services using the same single piece of hardware. A perfect example of this was when I first got my Psion Wavefinder (a USB DAB device) and used some software with it that allowed me to share stations in the way I described, I was listening to Life while my father listened to Planet Rock and within two hours my father excitedly informed me that he had won two tickets to see Deep Purple live in concert through Planet Rock, something he wouldn’t have been able to do had I not provided the shared access to the device. This got me thinking about the idea seriously.

The rest will be covered in part 2 coming soon.