Digital Video Broadcasting Technology
DVB Standards

DVB represents a set of open standards maintained by DVB Project (consortium) covering broadcasting of digital video or in general digital TV.

These standards are published by a Joint Technical Committee (JTC) of standardization organizations ETSI, CENELEC (European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization) and EBU (European Broadcasting Union). Therefore, they are internationally accepted. DVB was first adopted in Europe (United Kingdom).

Currently, except Europe DVB is also used in Australia, Asian, African and American countries. In addition to DVB, there are other standards for digital television, such as ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) employed e.g. in Canada, US or Mexico or ISDB (Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting) implemented in Japan [18].

DVB standards cover all aspects related to broadcasting and processing of digital video and audio at a physical and data link layer of a communication model. In details, these standards define modulations and forward error coding, multiplexing of several services into one transport stream, interfaces, etc. A lot of these aspects closely relate to transmission media used for broadcasting (terrestrial, satellite or cable). Some of standards that can be found within DVB are as follows [19]:

There are also other DVB standards not mentioned in the list above covering a subtitling, measurement, multiplexing, 3D-TV, IPTV, source coding, etc. but most of them are out of scope of this chapter.