KR100777459B1 - Program subscription method for set top box - Google Patents

Abstract

The present invention relates to a program reservation recording method using a satellite broadcasting receiver. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method of notifying whether a program can be safely recorded by checking the size of a program to be recorded and a free capacity of a device to be recorded.

The present invention is a satellite broadcasting reservation recording method for reserving and recording a satellite broadcasting program received through a satellite broadcasting receiver on a recording medium. Calculating a free capacity of a storage medium for recording the program, comparing the recording capacity of the program with the free capacity of the storage medium, and in the comparing step, the free capacity of the storage medium is equal to that of the program. When the recording capacity is exceeded, reservation recording is completed. According to such a configuration, the user can securely schedule and record a desired program.

Bit rate, reserved recording, hypocrisy receiver

Description

Schedule recording method of satellite receiver {PROGRAM SUBSCRIPTION METHOD FOR SET TOP BOX}

1 is a schematic block diagram of a general satellite broadcasting receiver;

2 is a flowchart illustrating a reservation recording method of a satellite broadcasting receiver of the present invention;

3 is a schematic block diagram of a satellite broadcast recorder of the present invention, and

4 is a diagram showing the structure of data recorded on the HDD.

* Description of symbols on the main parts of the drawings *

100: SET-TOP BOX 200: recording device

210: receiver 220: controller

230: HDD drive unit 240: HDD

250: key input unit 260: signal processing unit

270: OSD 280: display device

300: interface

The present invention relates to a program reservation recording method using a satellite broadcasting receiver (Set Top Box). More specifically, the present invention relates to a method of notifying whether a program can be safely recorded by checking the size of a program to be recorded and a free capacity of a device to be recorded.

Recently, due to the rapid development of information media, information has been shifted from the analog transmission to the digital transmission.

At this time, in response to the requirement to transmit more information within the same time, data is compressed and transmitted according to a data compression rule called MPEG (Moving Picture Expert Group), which defines a compression and decompression method for moving images.

This MPEG compresses and transmits audio visual, that is, audio signals, moving images, and still images at a high compression rate, thereby achieving multi-channel and high-quality transmission effects in broadcasting, and reducing storage volume and low cost in storage media. It is possible to obtain the effect of recording the multimedia information in the storage media of the media, and in the communication media can be obtained the advantage of being able to perform the multimedia communication at a low price, has recently become a core technology of the multimedia era.

On the other hand, general televisions are standardized to process analog broadcasting signals. As satellite broadcasting and other digital broadcasting methods are spreading, compression and transmission are performed according to MPEG regulations so that users can watch digital broadcasting signals through analog televisions. In order to process the converted digital broadcast signal into an analog broadcast signal, a separate broadcast apparatus called a satellite broadcast receiver, that is, a set top box is provided.                         

The satellite broadcasting receiver converts a digital video signal such as a program provider or a service provider, that is, each broadcasting station or cable broadcasting station, such as a cable television and a large number of satellite broadcasts into an analog video signal, so that signal processing is performed on the television. As a device for converting to a possible broadcast method, it is rapidly spreading in recent years thanks to the desire of consumers to watch digital broadcast signals.

Therefore, each broadcasting station or cable broadcasting station converts and provides a program analog signal of a service into a digital signal.

This converted data is compressed by a predetermined compression method to convey a lot of information, and then transmitted to the subscriber side through the communication network.

The subscriber's satellite broadcast receiver selects and watches a corresponding satellite, channel, audio subcarrier, etc. for each time of broadcasting, in order to tune a desired broadcast among a plurality of satellite broadcasts.

As such, there is a device as shown in FIG. 1 as a satellite broadcasting receiver for selecting and viewing a desired broadcasting satellite and channel and audio subcarrier frequency from the satellite.

The apparatus shown in FIG. 1 will be described as an example of a conventional satellite broadcasting receiver.

The satellite broadcasting receiver tunes a compressed hybrid carrier signal transmitted from a plurality of satellite or cable broadcasting stations through the input terminal 100 to a frequency of a corresponding channel and performs the tuning of the tuned carrier signal. The satellite broadcasting tuner 101 which changes the amplitude in proportion to the magnitude of the phase shift modulated signal input from the outside, and removes the mutual interference between the video signal and the audio signal in the carrier wave obtained by tuning through the satellite broadcast tuner 101 A diplexer 102 for providing the phase shift modulated signal to the satellite tuner 101, a filter 103 for filtering a carrier signal obtained from the diplexer 102, and extracting only a band of a digital signal; An analog / digital converter 104 for converting the analog signal extracted from the filter unit 103 into a digital signal and outputting the digital signal; and the analog / digital converter 10 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (105) for receiving two carrier signals having the same frequency and 90 degrees out of phase with each other, and modulating and outputting two discrete signals each having a finite value. And an automatic error correcting unit 106 for correcting the carrier data format modulated by the quadrature amplitude modulation unit 105 based on the surplus information and correcting the error caused by the interference between adjacent channels based on the redundant information. And a quadrature phase shift modulator for providing the phase shift modulated signal to the satellite broadcast tuner 101 through the diplexer 102 to change the instantaneous phase of the carrier wave inputted through the satellite broadcast tuner 101. 107 and video data and audio data input through the automatic error correcting unit 106 according to the phase shifting modulation signal of the quadrature shift modulator 107. In addition, it is restored and stored in the memory unit 110 and converted to the original composite video signal (CPSV) and audio signal (ADS) and output to the V through the video output terminal 112 and the audio output terminal 113, respectively. An MPEG processor 108 and a high frequency modulator for modulating a composite video signal (CPSV) and an audio signal (ADS) restored by the MPEG processor 108 into high frequency signals and outputting them to a television receiver through an output terminal 111 ( 109).

In the conventional satellite broadcasting receiver configured as described above, when a video signal and an audio signal for a broadcast program are compressed and mixed in each broadcasting station or a cable broadcasting station and input as a carrier signal through the input terminal 100, the satellite broadcasting is performed. The tuner 101 tunes a compressed hybrid carrier signal received and inputted through the input terminal 100 to a frequency of a corresponding channel and quadrature phase shift modulation, which will be described later, with the amplitude of the tuned carrier signal. The portion 107 is changed in proportion to the magnitude of the phase shift modulated signal.

Then, the amplitude-changed carrier signal is provided to the diplexer 102 through the satellite broadcast tuner 101.

The diplexer 102 removes mutual interference between the compressed video signal and the audio signal among the carrier signals obtained by tuning through the satellite broadcast tuner 101 and provides the filter unit 103 with the quadrature phase shift modulation. The phase shift modulated signal generated by the unit 107 is provided to the satellite tuner 101.

Meanwhile, the filter unit 103 filters the carrier signal input from the diplexer 102 to detect only the digital signal band.

The carrier signal of the analog component detected by the filter unit 103 is provided to the quadrature amplitude modulator 105 after being converted into a digital signal through the analog / digital converter 104.

The quadrature amplitude modulator 105 receives two digital carrier data having the same frequency from the analog / digital converter 104 and having a phase difference of 90 degrees, and amplitude modulates them into two discrete signals.

Carrier data amplitude-modulated by the quadrature amplitude modulator 105 is corrected by errors generated by interference between adjacent channels in the automatic error correction unit 106 and provided to the MPEG processor 108 as original video and audio packet data. do.

On the other hand, the quadrature phase shift modulator 107 generates a phase shift modulated signal and is provided to the MPEG processor 108.

Accordingly, the MPEG processor 108 synchronizes and restores the video data and the audio data input from the automatic error correcting unit 106 to the phase shift modulated signal of the quadrature phase shift modulating unit 107 and then stores the video data and audio data. In addition, it is also amplified by the original composite video signal (CPSV) and audio signal (ADS) and output to V-CAL through the respective video output terminal 112 and the audio output terminal 113, and also the high frequency modulator. To 109.

The high frequency modulator 109 modulates the complex video signal CPSV and the audio signal ADS processed by the MPEG processor 108 into a high frequency signal and provides the same to the television receiver through the output terminal 111. Will be able to watch satellite broadcasts through the Color Awards.

The composite video signal and the audio signal outputted to the video output terminal 112 and the audio output terminal 113 are provided to a recording apparatus such as a digital video disc player or digital VR to be recorded on a magnetic recording medium.

In this way, you can select and watch the desired satellite broadcasting through the satellite broadcasting receiver and record it if necessary, but if the recording capacity of the recording device is less than the expected recording capacity of the program to record, There is a problem with the entire recording.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION The present invention has been made in view of the above-described problem, and provides a recording method for finding a capacity of a hard disk to be recorded (hereinafter referred to as "HDD") and a capacity of broadcast information to be recorded and safely recording the same.

In addition, another object of the present invention is to provide a guide message to secure the insufficient capacity by deleting other programs recorded in the HDD when the recordable capacity of the HDD is less than the capacity of the broadcast information to be recorded.

In a preferred embodiment of the reservation recording method of the satellite broadcast receiver according to the present invention for achieving the above object in the satellite broadcast reservation recording method for reservation recording the satellite broadcast program received through the satellite broadcast receiver on a recording medium; Selecting a program to record, calculating a recording capacity using information related to the program selected in the step, calculating a free capacity of a storage medium to record the program, recording capacity of the program and the storage Comparing the free capacity of the medium and the step of completing the reservation recording setting when the free capacity of the storage medium in the comparison step exceeds the recording capacity of the program.

In the comparing step, when the free capacity of the storage medium is less than the recording capacity of the program, a warning message is processed by On Screen Display (hereinafter referred to as "OSD") to display a warning message on the monitor. It is made to include more.

In addition, the warning message preferably further comprises the step of indicating the insufficient capacity.

More preferably, the warning message may further include displaying the capacity of the program that can be deleted to compensate for the insufficient capacity and requesting the user to delete the file.

The calculating of the recording capacity includes calculating a bit rate. First, information about the modulation rate and the symbol rate and forward error correction (FORWARD ERROR CORRECTION) stored in the flash memory are extracted. In addition, since the transmission data including the error correction code (REED SOLOMON, hereinafter referred to as "RS") is 204 bytes, the number of bytes of only the data excluding the RS is 188 bytes. Accordingly, the bit rate is calculated by multiplying the modulation constant, the symbol rate, the FEC constant, and 188/204.

The calculated bitrate is divided by the number of TV channels of each TRANSPONDER (hereinafter referred to as "TP") to calculate the capacity per unit time allocated per channel.

By multiplying the capacity per unit time by the recording time, the recording capacity of the program to be recorded can be known.

Meanwhile, in calculating the remaining capacity of the storage medium for recording the program, the remaining capacity is extracted by extracting information of the cluster recorded in the HDD.

Hereinafter, an embodiment of the present invention will be described in detail with reference to the accompanying drawings.

FIG. 3 is a schematic block diagram of a satellite broadcast recorder according to the present invention, in which an image signal (CPSV), an audio signal (ADV), and related information are received from a satellite broadcast receiver 100 at a receiver 210. The signal processor 260 to process the signal. Information provided by the interface unit 300 includes general information related to the received program. That is, information related to the type of satellite, modulation method, symbol rate, FEC, TP, and channel number of the TV and radio, and the currently received channel and broadcast program recording are provided. The OSD 270 receives a signal from the signal processor 260 and outputs the information to the display device 280 to display related information in text form under the control of the controller 220. The controller 220 has a function of controlling the recording apparatus 200 according to the input of the key input unit 250. In addition, the recording capacity of the program to be recorded is calculated using the information provided through the interface unit 300. In addition, the remaining capacity for storing new data in the HDD 240 is calculated by receiving the relevant information from the HDD 240. The HDD driver 230 stores a broadcast program in the storage medium HDD 240 under the control of the controller 220 or reads the stored broadcast program and transmits it to the signal processor 260.

2 is a flowchart illustrating a reservation recording method of the satellite broadcasting receiver of the present invention.

The program guide to receive and record satellite broadcasts from a recording device such as a digital VRL is read (step S200). If the user selects a reservation program to be recorded (step S210), the reservation recording setting is completed using the information necessary for the reservation recording (step 220). If the reservation program is not selected in step S210 to perform a task of another routine (step S211).

The recording capacity of the program to be reserved is calculated using the information related to the reserved recording (step S230). To calculate the recording capacity, first calculate the bit rate of the TP. In order to calculate the bit rate, a constant according to a modulation method must be determined first. Each modulation method is checked and the constant decision is determined as follows. In the QPSK (QUARDRATURE PHASE SHIFT KEYING 4 phase phase shift structure) modulation method applied to the satellite service BskyB CANAL PLUS, the constant "2" is applied to the QFDM (ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEX orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) modulation method applied to the US ATV. Is programmed to assign a constant "2" for 4QFDM, a constant "3" for 8QFDM, and a constant "4" for 16QFDM. That is, in the QFDM method, the value of "n", which is calculated as 2 ms, is determined as a constant. Next, information about symbol rate (SYMBOLRATE) and forward error correction (FORWARD ERROR CORRECTION, hereinafter referred to as "FEC") stored in the flash memory of the satellite broadcasting receiver are extracted. In case of broadcasting using MPEG, the transport stream is most suitable as the multiplexing method. At this time, the basic data unit is a transport packet having a fixed length of 188 bytes and all information regardless of video, audio, and data input signals. Is sent by this packet. Therefore, since the transmission data including the error correction code (REED SOLOMON, hereinafter referred to as "RS") is 204 bytes, the bit rate is calculated by multiplying the modulation constant, the symbol rate, the FEC constant, and 188/204. In other words                     

Bitrate = modulation constant X symbol rate X FEC constant X 188/204

The bitrate of the TP to which the DWtv channel belongs is calculated.

In addition, since there are typically a plurality of channels in the TP, dividing the bit rate obtained in Equation (1) by the number of channels to be obtained calculates the bit rate for each channel. In other words

 (Equation 2) Each channel bitrate = modulation constant X symbol rate X FEC constant X 188/204 ÷ TP number per channel. Since the channel bitrate of Equation 2 is the capacity per second, multiplying the recording time of the program to be recorded in seconds (SECOND) multiplies the total capacity of the program to be recorded. In other words

(Eq. 3) Recording capacity = modulation constant X symbol rate X FEC constant X 188/204 ÷ channels per TP X recording reservation time.

For example, a case of recording a DWtv channel of ASIASAT2 (satellite) using QPSK modulation scheme (symbol rate is stored at 28.125MS / s in flash memory and 3/4 in FEC) is reserved for 1 hour. Explain.

First, to calculate the bit rate of the TP to which the DWtv channel belongs

In Equation 1, since the modulation method is QPSK modulation method in "Bit rate = modulation constant X symbol rate X FEC constant X 188/204", the modulation constant is 2. Also, since the symbol rate is 28.125 MS / s and FEC is 3/4, it becomes "Bit rate = 2 X 28.125 MS / s X 3/4 X 188/204" of the TP to which the DWtv channel belongs. Therefore, the bit rate of the TP to be obtained is 38.88 Mbps and 4.86 MBps.                     

And since the number of channels of the above TP is 6 TVs and 20 RADIOs, the bit rate allocated per TV channel is expressed as "Each channel bit rate = modulation constant X symbol rate X FEC constant X 188/204 ÷ The number of channels per TP "means" each channel bitrate = 4.86MBps ÷ 6 ", resulting in a bitrate of 0.81MBps per channel.

Therefore, in order to record for 1 hour, the recording capacity = modulation constant X symbol rate X FEC constant X 188/204 ÷ channels per TP X recording reservation time, so the recording capacity is 0.81MBps X 3600. The recording capacity of the program is about 2916MB.

Meanwhile, the remaining capacity of the HDD of the recording apparatus 200 to record the reserved program together with the capacity of the recorded program should be calculated (step S240).

In order to calculate the remaining capacity of the HDD, the number of remaining FATs must be checked first. The storage capacity of a typical HDD is calculated as follows.

(Equation 4) Storage capacity (byte) = Number of cylinders * Number of heads * Sectors per track * Sector size (bytes)

On the other hand, a cluster is a logical unit for storing files on a hard disk, and a sector is regarded as a minimum unit storage space that can be addressed, and thus data is read or written in sector units. A cluster consists of a certain number of sectors. When a file is written, the file is recorded in cluster units in the actual data area. Also, even if a program is stored in several clusters, the clusters do not always have to be contiguous, and they can be scattered around the HDD. In this case, the positions of several clusters associated with one file are managed in the file allocation table (FILE ALLOCATION TABLE, hereinafter referred to as "FAT") of the HDD. Therefore, when the cluster used in the FAT information is checked, the capacity used by the current HDD is calculated. .

Therefore, the remaining capacity is calculated by subtracting the capacity according to the cluster used from the total HDD capacity calculated in Equation 4. In other words,

(Eq. 5) HDD remaining capacity = (Eq. 4)-capacity of used cluster

Becomes Since this calculation method is the same as the drive capacity calculation method of a conventional computer, a detailed description thereof will be omitted.

When the calculation of the remaining capacity of the storage medium is completed in step S240, the recording capacity calculated in Equation 3 is compared with the HDD remaining capacity calculated in Equation 5 (step S250). If the remaining HDD capacity is larger than the recording capacity in step S250, reservation recording setting is completed using the related information (step S280). In addition, if the recording capacity is larger than the remaining HDD capacity in step S250, the reserved program cannot be recorded in all, and thus the controller 220 may warn the display device 280 that the recording capacity is insufficient through the OSD 270 and other programs. A screen for determining whether to secure an insufficient capacity by deleting the data is output (step S260). In step S260, it is preferable to display a program that can be deleted, a used capacity, and the like at the same time so that a user can delete an unnecessary program. On the other hand, if the user refuses to delete the file in step S260, the reservation recording setting is completed using the related information (step S280). In addition, if a program to be deleted is selected in step S260, the selected program is deleted (step S270) and the step S240 is repeated.                     

Although the present invention has been described in detail only with respect to the described embodiments, it will be apparent to those skilled in the art that various modifications and variations are possible within the technical scope of the present invention, and such modifications and variations belong to the appended claims.

As described above, according to the satellite broadcasting reservation recording method according to the present invention, since the estimated recording capacity of a program to be recorded can be calculated using the received satellite broadcasting information, the user can securely schedule and record a program to be recorded. .

Claims (6)

In the satellite broadcasting reservation recording method which reserves and records the satellite broadcasting program received through the satellite broadcasting receiver on a recording medium. Selecting a program to be recorded; Calculating a recording capacity using information related to the program selected in the step; Calculating a spare capacity of a storage medium for recording the program; Comparing the recording capacity of the program with the free capacity of the storage medium; And Comprising the step of completing the reservation recording when the free capacity of the storage medium in the comparing step exceeds the recording capacity of the program, The calculating of the recording capacity may include calculating the recording capacity using a bit rate. The method of claim 1, And displaying a warning message when the free capacity of the storage medium is less than the recording capacity of the program in the comparing step. The method of claim 2, The warning message further comprises the step of indicating the insufficient capacity satellite broadcasting reservation recording method. The method of claim 3, wherein And displaying the capacity of a program that can be deleted to compensate for the insufficient capacity and requesting the user to delete the file. The method of claim 1, The calculating of the recording capacity may include calculating a bit rate first, calculating a bit rate per channel by dividing the bit rate by the number of channels allocated per TP, and multiplying the bit rate per channel by the recording time to record the total amount required for recording. Satellite broadcasting reservation recording method comprising the step of calculating the capacity. The method of claim 5, And the bit rate is made by the following calculation formula. Bitrate = modulation constant X symbol rate X FEC X (188/204)

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