Software architecture for supporting FCC in DVB-S/C/T set top boxes

This paper presents a software architecture that supports fast channel change in DVB-S/C/T set top boxes. Long channel zapping time is an issue that has been addressed first in the context of IPTV set top boxes, where it has been an obstacle for successful commercialization of IPTV. In DVB-S/C/T the channel zapping time has not been in the focus that much, but with the development of tuners and appearance of STB boards with more tuners and decoders, the conditions were made for its further reduction. The aim is to improve user's quality of experience. The properties of our architecture have been discussed both with respect to resource management and to efficient processing of callbacks and notifications. The experimental results show reduction of channel zapping time from about 3 sec, to less than 800 msec.