Technology and Standards Group (formerly the T3) Reports

Technology Group Reports are informational documents approved by the Technology and Standards Group (TSG) that incorporate engineering consensus on information regarding ATSC Standards, Recommended Practices, and related industry activities.

T3-548 – ATSC Usage of the MPEG-2 Registration Descriptor

9 October 2001, Download PDF File

The purpose of this report is to clarify ATSC usage constraints that may not have been stated explicitly in the MPEG-2 Systems standard with the intention of defining usage for ATSC. MPEG-2 Systems has defined a registration descriptor that provides a method to uniquely and unambiguously identify formats of private data. SMPTE is the registration authority for the 32 bit format identifier field, guaranteeing that every assigned value will be unique. The MPEG-2 Registration Descriptor (MRD) is the basis for a set of guidelines developed to avoid collisions with the usage of privately defined fields and ranges within ATSC transport streams.

T3-549 – Collision Avoidance for Private Fields and Ranges

9 October 2001, Download PDF File

The ATSC and MPEG standards have numerous syntactical fields set aside for private use. In addition, many other fields have ranges defined as user private. The current situation allows the use of these fields in any way desired. While some scoping mechanisms exist, for example, the MPEG Registration Descriptor (MRD), the use of these mechanisms is voluntary. Indiscrete use of private fields and ranges can lead to collisions between privately defined services. This document presents a solution to the collision problem, through a number of guidelines.

T3-567 – Code Point Issues

7 February 2002, Download PDF File

This document is intended for authors and users of MPEG-2-based standards (e.g., SCTE, CEA, and SMPTE). It is intended to ensure harmonization of code points among all of these standards.

T3-600 – DTV Signal Reception and Processing Considerations

18 September 2003, Download PDF File

This report describes various aspects of VSB DTV signal reception and processing. This document is intended to complement ATSC Recommended Practice A/54, “The Guide to the Digital Television Standard," which provides an overview of DTV receivers. This report explores many aspects of receiver design in greater detail, with considerable emphasis on equalization techniques.

TSG-676 – Caption Carriage in E-VSB and with New Codecs

14 December 2005, Download PDF File

This Technology Group Report examines the carriage of closed captions in the optional E-VSB transmission mode and with the new codecs. The S13 ATSC Specialist Group's work focused on defining the means to carry the necessary closed captioning structure for various operating scenarios.

Document Format

ATSC documents are available in the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Reader, you may download a free reader from Adobe. Note that newer documents have been produced using Acrobat Version 7.0. This version, by default, writes files that can not be read by Readers before 6.0. It may be necessary, therefore, to download the latest version of Acrobat Reader.

Please note that some of these documents contain Normative References from Organizations that meet the criteria stated in the ATSC Policy on Copyright and References.