Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast

List of digital television broadcast standards
DVB standards (Europe)
DVB-S (satellite)
DVB-T (terrestrial)
DVB-C (cable)
DVB-H (handheld)
ATSC standards (North America/Korea)
ATSC (terrestrial/cable)
ATSC-M/H (mobile/handheld)
ISDB standards (Japan/Latin America)
ISDB-S (satellite)
ISDB-T (terrestrial)
ISDB-C (cable)
SBTVD/ISDB-Tb (Brazil)
DTMB standards (China)
DTMB-T/H (terrestrial/handheld)
CMMB (handheld)
DMB standards (Korean handheld)
T-DMB (terrestrial)
S-DMB (satellite)
MediaFLO
Codecs
Video
Audio
Frequency bands
VHF
UHF
SHF

DTMB (Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast) is the TV standard for mobile and fixed terminals used in the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong and Macau. Although at first this standard was called DMB-T/H (Digital Multimedia Broadcast-Terrestrial/Handheld), the official name is DTMB.

DTT broadcasting systems. Countries using DTMB or DMB-T/H are shown in red.

Overview

The DTMB is a merger of the following standards: ADTB-T (developed by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai), DMB-T (developed by Tsinghua University, Beijing) and TiMi (Terrestrial Interactive Multiservice Infrastructure), which is the standard proposed by the Academy of Broadcasting Science in 2002.

At first, neither Shanghai Jiao Tong University nor Tsinghua had not enough political strength to make their own technology being the unique standard, so the final decision was to opt for a double standard, merged with theTIMI 3 standard, responding to a need of backward compatibility.

The DTMB was created in 2004 and finally became an official DTT standard in 2006.

DTMB in China

DTMB in Hong Kong

DTMB in Macau

Versus CMMB

See China Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting (CMMB).

Countries and territories using DTMB

Asia

Middle East

Description

Besides the basic functions of traditional television service, the DTMB allows additional services using the new television broadcasting system. DTMB system is compatible with fixed reception (indoor and outdoor) and mobile digital terrestrial television.

Modulation

The DTMB standard uses many advanced technologies to improve their performance, for example, a pseudo-random noise code (PN) as a guard interval that allows faster synchronization system and a more accurate channel estimation, Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) encoding to protect against mistakes, modulation Time Domain Synchronization - Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (TDS-OFDM) which allows the combination of broadcasting in SD, HD and multimedia services, etc.

This system gives flexibility to the services offered to support the combination of single-frequency networks (SFN) and multi-frequency networks (MFN). The different modes and parameters can be chosen depending on the type of service and network's environment.

The sequence of pseudo-random pattern is defined in time domain and the information of the Discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is defined in the frequency domain. The two frames are multiplexed in the time domain, resulting in Time domain synchronization (TDS).

Functional scheme

This transmission system makes the conversion of the input signal to the output data of terrestrial TV signal.

The data passes through the encoder, the error protection process FEC (Forward Error Correction), through the constellation mapping process and then the interleaving processes the information to create the data blocks. The data block and the TPS information are multiplexed, and pass through the data processor to form the body structure. It combines information from the body and the head to form the frame and this is passed through the SRRC (Square Root Raised Cosine) filter to become a signal within a 8MHz channel bandwidth. Finally the signal is modulated to put it in the corresponding frequency band.

Features

Further reading

See also

External links