Nokia Technology Gmbh

Thomas Rautenberg

Stephan Hartwig

Tilman Bollmann

The invention concerns a method of increasing the storage capacity of service information data (SI) in a receiver for digital TV transmissions, such as e.g. in accordance with the MPEG 2 and the DVB standard. The increase takes place to enable keeping a larger quantity of service information data ready for recall, which is used to create the display of an interactive electronic program guide that is shown as an &ldquo;On Screen Display&rdquo; (OSD) on the screen. Such a program guide is designed to make the transmission choice easier and to automate the adjustment of the receiver for the desired transmission. The object of the invention is to provide a solution which makes it possible to expand the storage capacity, especially the mentioned cache area, without additional hardware. To achieve the object the unoccupied area of the image memory (MPEG-RAM) is used as a cache area by the video decoder (V-DEC) while graphic displays are shown on the full screen surface as a &ldquo;Full Screen OSD&rdquo;. To create the electronic program guide the microcomputer (&mgr;C), which is responsible for managing the receiver, uses this cache area to buffer as large a portion as possible of the service information (SI) extracted from the receiver by a demultiplexer.

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Bochum, Germany

Thomas Rautenberg