Peter Kaczowka wrote:
You mention "the next few years" - but in the next few years video will be
going digital; much of it already is. Isn't all the below discussion
relevant only to analog video?
Yes and No...
The current ATVEF-A standard is for analog video, but the standard is
easily separated from it's transport.
With digital video, ATVEF-type information
wouldn't be encoded in specific scanlines, would it?
No. But it would be encoded in private mpeg frames. The ATVEF-A
standard is a little bit more than just "tell the viewer to refer to
this URL" one-way broadcast HTMLish data. It nicely encompasses
everything you'd want to do with interactive TV from the broadcast
perspective.
In the reference I provided, there's only one small mention of the
actual transport (it's on teletext-2). Everything else concerns those
things you might want to setup for a broadcast HTML.
Does ATVEF address
digital video?
Such a digital standard is in the works. Every digital packet has an
ID. You need a few ID's to represent a channel; at a minimum, one for
video and two for audio packets. If you want closed captioning or
subtitles, those too would have unique ID's for the channel. Another
ID might be for IP data, and another ID might be for ATVEF-A data (no
need to piggy-back with CC, like with the analog).
Chris
