Abstract:
Teletext is a kind of information service that can be broadcasted by television stations. This service is currently provided in Thailand on TV channel 5. Teletext signals are inserted by the broadcast station between normal television signal frames. Hence they are not visible on ordinary TV sets. To view the teletext data, a special device called Teletext Decoder must be inserted between and ordinary TV set and its receiving antenna. Through this device, the viewer has an option to view either a normal television program or a selectable text information page. This research presents the detailed study of various characteristics of teletext signals and a development of a Thai/English teletext decoder with remote controller. The study has revealed that the internal code format of a teletext signal consists of clock bits, framing code, magazine address, row address and text data. Although each text data occupies only 7 bits, the broadcasting system support both Thai/English fonts by using special control codes as font switches. The hardware of the developed teletext decoder consists of many ready-made TV parts such as tuner, modulator and remote controller. Its decoding section also employs several large-scale integrated circuits such as Video Input Processor, Enhanced Computer Controlled Teletext decoder IC, CRT controller, static RAM, and a 8051 family of microcontrollers having I²C bus. These integrated circuits perform many important functions such as slicing teletext data from the input video signal, collecting serial teletext data into a page memory and constructing a video signal of the text data.