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www.TELE-satellite.com —
06-07-08/2012 —
TELE-satellite International —
全球发行量最大的数字电视杂志
Rod would gladly record more TV
channels: “The goal is to record at a
minimum of one TV channel from every
country.”
But there are limits to what the ‘Inter-
net Archive’ organization can do: “The
amount of data involved is absolutely
gigantic and every additional channel
that we continuously record each time
means a high investment.” Even if the
foundation that supports ‘Internet Ar-
chive’ has a lot of money behind it, the
resources are still limited. “Any expan-
sion is done with great care.”
It’s interesting to note that Rod
Hewitt also records the EPG data for
‘Internet Archive’. “Here by the win-
dow I have a small antenna pointed
to DishNetwork at 72W. Once a day I
automatically record all the EPG data.
It takes about 20 minutes before all
the data has been received and it
amounts to about 300MB.” The EPG
data contains programming informa-
tion for the next nine days. Rod re-
cords the data daily on a rolling basis
and sends the data on a hard drive to
the ‘Internet Archive’ headquarters in
San Francisco.
Rod is also planning to record the EPG
data from BBC. “But they’re not mak-
ing it easy for me: the BBC sends the
EPG data as a bitmap and not in text
format. I would first need to write a
program that could read the bitmaps in
OCR.” Rod is always getting new chal-
lenges placed in front of him. And what
does he have planned for TSReader?
“Last year I made TSReader com-
patible with ISDB-T and also adapted
it to AIT. Aside from that, TSReader
is now also compatible with many dif-
ferent typesets so that, for example,
Greek and Cyrillic can be properly dis-
played.” But it doesn’t stop there: “I
just received an e-mail that says there
are still problems with the display of
Slovakian characters.” It’s actually not
really a problem; Rod just needs a cor-
responding data stream so that he can
adapt TSReader with it.
Rod is currently working on a project
for IPTV: “I’m in the process of writ-
ing software that would let you dis-
play various IPTV channels in mosaic
form.” This is an especially interest-
ing piece of software for IPTV opera-
tors to control their programming. Rod
1. Rod’s current project: the mosaic display
of live video from IPTV channels.
2. Many satellite enthusiasts as well as
digital TV professionals use Rod Hewitt’s
TSReader software. It displays all of
the available PIDs in a data stream plus
additional details such as bit rate. FTA
channels are displayed in a window. The
Lite version can be downloaded free of
charge from Rod Hewitt’s web site at www.
coolstf.com or www.tsreader.com .
has even more ideas: “You could build
a small adapter and connect it to an
LNB and transmit reception data to an
iPhone or iPad via Bluetooth. In this
way you wouldn’t need your own signal
analyzer; you could use the display and
processor power in the iPhone or iPad
for the measurements.” Wow, what a
fantastic idea! “Or you could use WiFi
instead of Bluetooth”, continues Rod
regarding his ideas on the possibilities
with today’s technology. “I’m not sure
yet if I’ll get involved with that”, grins
Rod.
Rod clearly isn’t short on ideas. His
examples only prove that there’s still
more to be discovered and developed.
Innovations today are much more than
just possible, you just have to come up
with the right ideas.