Efficient DVB-MHP to Blu-Ray System Information Transcoding

Blu-ray is a new-generation DVD format. Compared to the traditional DVD technology, Blu-ray offers advanced interactive features, high definition video quality and storage capacity that is more than 5 times that of DVD. DVB-MHP, on the other hand, is the latest Digital Video Broadcasting standard which supports a Multimedia Home Platform, specifically designed for offering advanced interactive TV services. Although both systems support Java-based interactivity, there are several differences between the two to make them incompatible. Our ultimate goal is to ensure compatibility between the two interactive services, enabling the video and interactive contents transmitted by the DVB-MHP system to be played in real time on the Blu-ray platform. One of the main challenges in realizing this compatibility is the conversion of DVB-MHP metadata, which are System Information transmitted in MPEG-2 Transport Stream packets, to the format supported by the Blu-ray standard. This study analyzed the differences between the two standards in terms of the System Information and proposed methods that ensure the desired compatibility. An optimized method for generating Program Association, Program Map and Selection Information contents for the Blu-ray system using DVB-MHP information at the elementary stream and transport stream levels is presented. Our approach takes advantage of the existing correlation between the two systems, adapts the existing DVB-MHP metadata, and intelligently searches for the information needed from the DVB-MHP elementary streams to generate in real-time the Blu-ray equivalent information.