• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.83-90
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• 2004

DVB-MHP recommends that NPT(normal play time) be used as the times of stream events. NPT is the local time within an event(TV program). But we found that commercial transport stream (TS) generators and middlewares for DVB-MHP settop boxes are not ready to support the use of NPT by applications. In particular, TS generators do not create NPT reference descriptors needed to reconstruct NPT at the TV receiver. This situation is undesirable because program providers cannot experiment with the idea of synchronized applications. So we have implemented a TS generator that inserts NPT reference descriptors to TS and MyGetNPT API to approximately reconstruct NPT. STC (system time clock) is needed to reconstruct NPT, but Xlets are not allowed to read it. So, we approximate STC by using PCR (program clock reference) and the Java system tune. In this method, the stream generator extrats PCRs from an existing TS and inserts them into null TS packets in the form of MPEG sections, which can be read by Xlets. Because PCRs are displaced into new positions in TS, their values should be adjusted based on the time intervals between the original positions and the new positions. We implemented a synchronized application by using our TS generator and MyGetNPT API, where the task of stream events are to display graphic images. We found that graphic images are displayed where 240 ㎳ from their intended time, where 240ms is a human tolerance for the synchronization skew between graphic image and video.