Summary of a project (part 2)

Over the next several months I produced software to let me present the contents of all UK DAB and DVB-T multiplexes in a web based format. I also wrote code that would stream a service selected in the web browser to a media playing client on the user’s computer, my main test clients were Winamp for DAB and VideoLAN Client for DVB. My achievements also included doing what I believe was a world first for DAB network streaming and that was to include the DLS text in the stream so anyone using a Shoutcast compatible player was able to see the text that gets transmitted and updated on a DAB radio station.

The DAB side was the part I managed to mature the most. I even managed to implement a system for processing and displaying the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG), however I didn’t get the chance to develop a scheduled recording system to accompany this. I integrated the tuning of the device into the web shell so that you could discover what audio services were available to you and I dealt with multiplex locking so that once one user was using a multiplex subsequent users could not change the multiplex until there were no other users using the multiplex anymore. I had also started to implement code to automatically download the EPG and download other data off the DAB multiplexes including Broadcast Web Sites (BWS) which are mini websites which you can download and display such as a compact version of BBCi.

The DVB element proved difficult to develop and it took quite a long time to get to grips with the complexities of the MPEG2 standard and I had some difficulties interfacing with my TV card. However I did managed to stream the Transport Stream (TS) data to a remote client (albeit very inefficiently).Unfortunately this wasn’t as good as I’d expected since the data wasn’t converted to the DVD and PC friendly Program Stream (PS) format which can be played very easily, I had attempted to convert from TS and PS on the fly but this proved to be quite a difficult challenge which I simply didn’t have time for. Processing the data was quite a difficult task and I had to decode quite a bit of information before I could get a picture of a multiplex’s setup and determine which were the bits of data that constituted a TV channel or a radio station. Because I didn’t get my TV card working with my software until it was nearly deadline time I used a dump of multiplex data I had acquired back when I first got the card and after around 6 months of hard work I was finally able to play back the 7 minutes of data I had recorded which included a Scooby Doo cartoon I had captured during the time, success couldn’t be sweeter than finally watching it play correctly.

In conclusion the project went well in terms of providing the concepts that I wanted to, I managed to produce something that put into practice my theories, was fairly efficient in terms of computer resources used and impressed my University supervisors. What I have failed to do since has been to take this idea to the next level and finish developing it fully (I did start to rewrite it into a better designed system) and find a way to develop it commercially since I graduated. However the idea has not died and if I do not get a chance to develop the technology further I would not be surprised it see it offered by many consumer electronics and software companies in the coming years once they see the possibilities in sharing resources over a network like I have.