BBC Research: world's first reception of HD pictures over DTT using DVB-T2

Monday, September 1st, 2008
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On the 60th birthday of BBC Kingswood Warren, engineers from BBC Research & Innovation succeeded in demonstrating a working real-time demodulator capable of receiving signals compliant to the DVB-T2 standard for the very first time.

Following the approval of the standard by the DVB on 26 June and then the successful test transmissions from Guildford on 27 June, the achievement – on Friday 29 August – is another significant milestone in the delivery of HD over Freeview.

This is the first time anywhere in the world that a live end-to-end DVB-T2 chain has been demonstrated.

Justin Mitchell, leader of the DVB-T2 modem development team at the BBC, said: “Following the approval of DVB-T2 in June and the launch of test transmissions from Guildford transmitter the next day, we are delighted that on Kingswood Warren’s 60th anniversary our team has been able to deliver a working demonstration of a DVB-T2 modulator and demodulator.”

There will be a demonstration of the DVB-T2 modulator and demodulator on the DVB stand 1.D81 at IBC in Amsterdam in September 2008.

This will be accompanied by hourly talks and conference papers.

The modulator and demodulator are available for licensing.

The demonstration consists of:

  • A 36 Mbit/sec multiplex containing three high definition programmes each coded at 11 Mbit/sec with the latest MPEG-4 encoders
  • This is fed into the prototype DVB-T2 modulator which was developed by R&I, and is currently providing the test transmissions from Guildford transmitter
  • This signal is then received by the prototype DVB-T2 demodulator which was developed by R&I which demodulates the DVB-T2 signal and converts it to an MPEG transport stream
  • The transport stream is then fed to an MPEG-4 decoder which displays the video on a high definition display.

The demonstration shows several of the new features contained within the new DVB-T2 specification. These include:

  • 32K FFT
  • 1/128 guard interval
  • LDPC error correction (64800 size blocks) and BCH error correction
  • Rotated 256-QAM constellations
  • Time interleaving
  • Extended bandwidth

The operating mode of the demonstration is: 32K 1/128 256-QAM 3/5 64800.