DVB-S2

List of digital television broadcast standards
DVB standards (Europe)
DVB-S (satellite)
  • DVB-S2
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

Digital Video Broadcasting - Satellite - Second Generation (DVB-S2) is a digital television broadcast standard that has been designed as a successor for the popular DVB-S system. It was developed in 2003 by the DVB Project, an international industry consortium, and ratified by ETSI (EN 302307) in March 2005. The standard is based on, and improves upon DVB-S and the electronic news-gathering (or Digital Satellite News Gathering) system, used by mobile units for sending sounds and images from remote locations world-wide back to their home television stations.

DVB-S2 is envisaged for broadcast services including standard and HDTV, interactive services including Internet access, and (professional) data content distribution. The development of DVB-S2 coincided with the introduction of HDTV and H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) video codecs.

Two new key features that were added compared to the DVB-S standard are:

Other features include enhanced modulation schemes up to 32APSK, additional code rates, and the introduction of a generic transport mechanism for IP packet data including MPEG-4 audio–video streams, while supporting backward compatibility with existing MPEG-2 TS based transmission.

DVB-S2 achieves a significantly better performance than its predecessors – mainly allowing for an increase of available bitrate over the same satellite transponder bandwidth. The measured DVB-S2 performance gain over DVB-S is around 30% at the same satellite transponder bandwidth and emitted signal power. When the contribution of improvements in video compression is added, an (MPEG-4 AVC) HDTV service can now be delivered in the same bandwidth that supported an early DVB-S based MPEG-2 SDTV service only a decade before.

Contents

Main features

Depending on code rate and modulation, the system can operate at a C/N between -2.4 dB (QPSK, 1/4) and 16 dB (32APSK, 9/10) with a quasi-error free goal of a 10−7 TS packet error rate. Distance to the Shannon limit ranges from 0.7 dB to 1.2 dB.

Use Cases

Envisaged scenarios for DVB-S2 by the standard document are:

The DVB-S to DVB-S2 upgrade process

The conversion process from DVB-S to DVB-S2 is being accelerated, due to the rapid increase of HDTV and introduction of 3D-HDTV. The main factor slowing down this process is the need to replace or upgrade set-top boxes, which makes the transition slower for established operators.

DirecTV in the U.S. is now switching over to DVB-S2 with H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec for their local and some national HDTV channels.

Current direct-to-home broadcasters using DVB-S2 are:

These broadcasters have used DVB-S2 in their internal broadcast distribution networks, but may not have instituted DVB-S2 transmissions for consumers.

The typical lifetime of a Direct-to-Home Set Top Box is about five years, with some lasting seven years or more. Therefore it is to be expected that the conversion process to DVB-S2 should take about ten years as a baseline estimate.

See also

References

External links