Car DVD Player Mysteries – What is ISDB-T?
Today’s modern car DVD players are versatile machines. Many not only come with a wide range of features (GPS navigation, the ability to receive analog TV signals, several different types of audio file decoding capabilities, etc.), but can also be used in many parts of the world. , each with its own method of sending and receiving digital broadcast signals.
Answering the question “Mysteries of Car DVD Player: What is ISDB-T?” could be something worth looking at when trying to figure out how a car DVD player works.
For starters, all car DVD players work to handle incoming broadcast signals of radio, television, or other information in certain ways. One of the things the player has to do is understand the digital broadcast signal standard used in the country where the player is used. There are several different kinds of signal around the world and ISDB (“Integrated Services Digital Broadcast”) is one of them.
This particular way of sending and receiving digital signals (analog broadcast signals for TV and radio are fast disappearing in terms of popularity and usage) is a standard developed in Japan for how digital TV and radio stations send and receive those signals.
It is also a replacement for what was called “MUSE” or “high vision” analog high-definition TV (HDTV). With digital signals, much more information can be delivered much more efficiently than with the older standard analog signals, by the way.
Basically, ISDB-T is a way to efficiently compress digital video and audio signals so that a device can handle a wide variety of formats (MPEG-2, JPEG, and MPEG-4, for example). ISDB is versatile and comes in a wide variety of signal modulations (which have to do with the frequency at which the signal is transmitted).
In any case, several other countries besides Japan now use ISDB standards, including the Philippines and several nations in Central and South America (Brazil, El Salvador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela are just a few).
The types of devices that can make use of ISDB-T tuners to receive these digital signals are varied, and one could see it in devices like car DVD players, cell phones that can receive digital broadcast signals, and also laptops that can do the same thing.
Around the world, standards for digital broadcasting also vary, with some countries falling under what is called ATSC (new to North America, it replaced the old NTSC standard in mid-2009 and is projected to take over entirely in Mexico by 2021 and Canada by 2011) and others included in DVB-T, to name just a couple of examples.
Today’s modern devices must be versatile enough to be sold anywhere, of course, and may have two or more such tuners in order to sell widely.
It’s also fairly easy to find out what standard your country is using by going online or looking at the devices being sold in your country, all of which will tell you what transmission standards they’re capable of handling. Anyone considering purchasing a car DVD player should take comfort in the knowledge that most devices today will be able to handle a number of different signals, both efficiently and very easily.