welcome

Welcome to the DVB Decoder website. DVB Decoder is a utility designed to take a pre-recorded DVB transport stream (oh, that's Digital Video Broadcasting, by the way), and analyse the stream down to its individual tables. If you don't understand that, you probably don't need this program...

The program was originally written in Visual C++ .NET 2003, and this version is currently available for download from the project's Sourceforge page. It's been designed for Australian terrestrial broadcasts and understands Standard Definition and High Definition video, and MPEG and AC-3 encoded audio. It also happily decodes the Australian implementation of Logical Channel Numbers. That being said, it should decode (most of) any DVB transport stream you may have, including satellite or cable streams.

live decoding

The current version (dvbdecoder2003) allows for decoding of a live (off-air) stream when used with a Nebula DigiTV card or USB box (only the USB model has been tested). The decoding offered is of a 'might work' kind of implementation, and is a bit dodgy. While I have found it to be quite helpful on occasion, a much more reliable way of decoding a stream is to pre-record the full transport stream using another application and load the resultant file into DVB Decoder the 'normal' way...

future efforts

I originally had plans to rewrite DVB Decoder using wxWidgets and MinGW / GCC, so that the application was available to Windows and Linux users. While I still think it's a noble idea, the fact is that I don't run Linux except for servers (shame on me) and really enjoy C# as a language. Hence, the rewrite of DVB Decoder will probably be written in C#, perhaps using Visual C# 2005 so that it can be compiled using the free Express Edition from Microsoft. It is possible that with a little coaxing, it may also compile under Mono, which may achieve the same thing in the end anyway... Anyway, using C# also gives me the opportunity to play with nUnit testing as well.

contact

If you have any questions regarding the design or use of DVB Decoder, please feel free to drop me a line at daggmano[at]users.sourceforge.net. Oh, and feel free to donate to the project as well...