The infrastructure for our experiments consists of several 350 MHz Pentium-II PC's running Windows 98 with video boards that provide color space conversion. This card provides the basic functionality to receive an ATSC modulated RF signal off the air via a standard rooftop antenna and perform channel tuning, demodulation, and error correction.
Any further processing is performed by software.
The top board can receive NTSC signals while the bottom board handles digital ATSC signals. The DTV hardware is accessed through an experimental API that shields the application software from the hardware details. At the lowest level this API demultiplexes the transport stream and delivers packets of chosen audio, video, or data streams. There is an accompanying SDK for these API's. Since the hardware only provides the raw MPEG-2 transport stream, all demultiplexing and MPEG decoding is performed by software.