Patent ID: 8261310

Claim:
A method of providing a cross table analysis display in a digital broadcast system, the method comprising: accessing, by a testing device located upstream of an end-user digital television receiver, at least two transmitted metadata tables included within one transmitted MPEG-2 Transport broadcast stream; performing a cross table analysis directly on syntax and field values of the at least two transmitted metadata tables included within the broadcast stream to determine consistencies and inconsistencies between the syntax and field values within the at least two transmitted metadata tables; displaying, in the testing device, a result of the cross table analysis of the syntax and field values within the at least two transmitted metadata tables using a user-selectable graphical user interface without discarding inconsistencies in the syntax and field values between the at least two transmitted metadata tables, thereby a user can visually determine the consistencies and inconsistencies between the metadata tables; and selectively automatically highlighting relationships of the field values among the analyzed metadata tables only when any one of the analyzed metadata tables or groupings of analyzed metadata tables have been, selected by the user, wherein the testing device uses the syntax and field values of the user selected metadata table as a reference to highlight syntax and field values of the other analyzed metadata tables based on the cross table analysis; wherein the transmitted metadata tables include tables from at least one of program specific information (PSI) tables, and program and system information protocol (PSIP) tables, wherein the displaying the result of the cross table analysis step displays the transmitted metadata tables in an expanded form including names of individual metadata tables, fields and field values within the individual metadata tables on a single display screen of the graphical user interface such that the user can view all of the analyzed metadata tables on the single display screen, and wherein the selectively automatically highlighting step automatically highlights a selected first transmitted metadata table and/or syntax/field within the first transmitted metadata table with a first color and all other transmitted metadata tables and/or syntax/field within the other transmitted metadata tables that are different than the selected first transmitted metadata table, have a relationship to the selected first transmitted metadata table and that have a consistency with the selected first transmitted metadata table with the first color and automatically highlights said other transmitted metadata tables and/or field within the other transmitted metadata tables that have an inconsistency with the selected first transmitted metadata table with a second color different than the first color to emphasize the consistencies and inconsistencies with the displayed metadata tables and incorrect and missing links between the displayed metadata tables in the single display screen.