DvbDream Community

The "MD" in MD-API stands for Multidec, a fine freeware program written in Germany. It originally supported digitized analog video but was later upgraded to support one of the first DVB-S cards on the market - the Hauppauge Nexus-S card designed by TechnoTrend. This card has a DVB-S tuner along with a TI DSP which allows it to decode MPEG-2 video from satellite in real-time with virtually no load on the PC's processor and also has pure analog interlaced video output for displaying the received video directly on a TV.

Because of the way this card works, if a program on the PC requests part of the data stream coming from the satellite tuner, the data from that PID is sent, but with the transport stream header missing. This odd-standard has hung around and by default all MD-API plugins are sent packets but with the transport header missing. AudioRip was originally written for the Broadlogic card which delivers the entire packet, so when the AudioRip Plugin was developed, we took advantage of the fact that TSReader can be tricked into sending over the entire packet by sending the PID to be monitored with the top bit set.

Additionally when TSReader is given a PID with the top bit set it doesn't buffer as much data per packet as other programs - normal MD-hosting programs send 5 transport packets sans header. TSReader behaves the same way except when the top bit is set - it then sends one 188 byte packet at a time. Important here because song titles are sent once per second on Dish Network and just happen to occupy exactly one transport stream packet.

If programs like ProgDVB and MyTheater supported these extensions to the MD-API, AudioRip plugin should work fine with them.