1. COMPANY REPORT Software Programmierer Rod Hewitt, USA
The Man
Behind
TSReader:
Rod Hewitt
• Wrote one of the most successful stream reader
programs
• Developed a technical solution to archive TV
channels for ‘Internet Archive’
■ Rod Hewitt enjoys reading TELE-
• Working on IPTV application programs satellite magazine. The picture of the
Eiffel Tower in his living room highlights
• Planning on a program for OCR recognition of the fact the he can speak French fluently
and loves the French way of life.
BBC’s EPG data
200 TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 06-07-08/2012 — www.TELE-satellite.com www.TELE-satellite.com — 06-07-08/2012 — TELE-satellite International — 全球发行量最大的数字电视杂志 201

2. COMPANY REPORT Software Programmierer Rod Hewitt, USA
One of the most well-known analyzer despite of that (or perhaps because
programs for digital TV is TSReader. of that) he became successful. We
This program can be used to analyze met up with him at his home in
the transport stream of a digital chan- Annapolis. Computers (he’s a
nel: the software identifies every single fan of Apple) and digital receiv-
PID of a digital transponder as well as ers are scattered all over his
ë
a world of additional information such apartment. “I used to have
as bit rate or the type of PIDs. Video more satellite dishes includ-
PIDs are displayed as a live picture ing a 4.5-meter antenna”, Annapolis,
and audio PIDs can be listened to. An explains Rod to us, “but to-
analyzer program like TSReader is an day a cable connection and
Maryland, USA
invaluable tool for technicians; it lets good Internet access is suf-
them monitor the data stream so that ficient.”
any errors can be quickly identified and
dealt with. But first things first. Rod
Hewitt comes from Ware, a
TSReader was developed by Rod small town about 40km north of
Hewitt who is originally from England. London, about half way between
For the past several years he has called Stevenage and Harlow. “Ware sits
Annapolis, the capital of the state of exactly on the Prime Meridian, that
Maryland on the east coast of the USA, is, precisely at 0° longitude”, says
his home. Rod Hewitt’s life story is Rod. His father worked as the Manag- ■Rod Hewitt lives and works in this
modern apartment building in Annapolis,
typical for many software engineers: ing Director at Ferguson, a well-known Maryland, USA. Just a small 40cm antenna
he dropped out of school early and yet manufacturer of TVs back then. “My identifies the location of his apartment.
202 TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 06-07-08/2012 — www.TELE-satellite.com

3. 1 3
father occasionally took me with him to work that they invited me to stay.” Rod
work and I managed to pick up a few didn’t take long to decide; giving up the
things about TV reception.” It got more rainy weather in northern London for
interesting in 1980: “I was 14 years old consistently sunny days in California?
then and had access to the university’s It was a no-brainer. Since he had al-
computer through my school.” ready worked for many years for the
company in England, it wasn’t difficult
As many other software pioneers to get a work permit.
did back then, the young Rod Hewitt
learned the secrets to computer pro-
gramming. “I learned everything on 1. In this digital day and age large
my own.” And just like other life sto- offices are no longer necessary. Rod
Hewitt works from home and simply
ries from this day and age, Rod also installed the technology for the
couldn’t take it much longer going to 24/7/365 recording of TV channels in
his bedroom. In the background is
school: “I dropped out of school at 16 the PC with the slots for multiple hard
and started working for a computer drives.
distributing company.” 2. Rod explains the setup: “These
four cable receivers each of which
have two tuners are connected to the
In 1983 this company added a new cable connection in my apartment via
computer model to their product line an eight-way splitter and an active
and wouldn’t you know it: “It was the amplifier.” Using two large PCs, with
one as a backup, Rod records the
successor model to the same type of data stream from 22 channels. The
computer on which I learned to pro- filled hard drives are sent to ‘Internet
Archive’ in San Francisco to be
gram by myself.” In other words, Rod archived.
was instantly up to speed with all the 3. Rod uses a monitor to keep an
secrets of this new computer model eye on all the MPEG data from the
and took over the support of this man- recorded TV channels. He uses mini
MACs for his work. Replacement
ufacturer’s computer models. hard drives are ready to go as soon
as one is full. “They’re automated to
A few years later, in 1988, he was in- the extent that I can record all 22 TV
channels uninterrupted with my two
vited by this company to travel to the PCs and all the empty hard drives for
USA to handle a project.“ I spent three about one month.”
weeks in Santa Anna, California in Or- 4. The old recording system based on
2 ange County and the Manager of the 4 DLT (Digital Live Tape). Rod is now
busy transferring the recorded data
company was so impressed with my on the tapes over to hard drives.
204 TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 06-07-08/2012 — www.TELE-satellite.com www.TELE-satellite.com — 06-07-08/2012 — TELE-satellite International — 全球发行量最大的数字电视杂志 205

4. Those were the best of times for the volved with satellite reception. He ac- ‘Internet Archive’ in Los Angeles con-
computer business. “This company had quired the Nokia D-Box and installed tacted Rod. The goal of this organi-
as many as 400 employees”, remem- the DVB98 software and later on the zation, founded in 1996, is to build a
bers Rod, “and one of their many cus- DVB2000 software: “It allowed you to complete Internet archive which would
tomers was a company in Maryland on do blind scans.” Rod became a regular also include the archiving of TV chan-
the east coast of the USA.” feed hunter. nels. They stumbled onto Rod through
is MPEG2 paper: anyone who was so
As business started to slowly fall off At the same time he developed his familiar with modern TV technology
for the California company, a job offer first software application for his em- would undoubtedly know how to record
came from the company in Maryland. ployer; it was a terminal program for TV channels.
Should Rod move to the east coast of Windows that he offered on his new
the USA? “There was one important website www.coolstf.com. As it turned out, they found the right
factor in making this decision: back person: “I worked up a strategy on how
then the BBC World Service could be “In 1997 I got a little nosy and you would record and archive channels
found at 58W and in Maryland it was opened up my D-Box.” To his surprise and made a proposal to ‘Internet Ar-
easy to receive this signal.” he recognized all of the installed chips chive’.” It involved the sum of a quar-
and knew exactly how each of them ter million US dollars recalls Rod. “It in-
Rod moved to Annapolis and erected functioned. He got in touch with the cluded the complete infrastructure and
his first satellite dish: “It was a two- developer of DVB98 and DVB2000 and technological design.”
meter antenna. BBC transmitted the proposed an improvement. Rod then
signal in the clear so that it could be wrote the program DVBEdit himself. Rod won the contract! He constructed
accessed by Canadian PayTV provid- a reception station for 20 TV channels
ers.” BBC didn’t count on private satel- In the meantime Rod worked himself as well as the technology for recording
lite enthusiasts receiving their channel, so deep into digital TV that he wrote a these channels. “We record the chan-
so not long after that, BBC encrypted paper on the operation of MPEG2 (still nels in their entirety, 24 hours a day,
the signal. worth reading today at www.tsreader. seven days a week, 365 days a year.”
com/legacy). In 1999 coincidence once
But by the time that happened, again stepped into Rod’s life: an em- That was not as easy to do in 2000 as
Rod had already become more in- ployee at the non-profit organization it is today. “The cost effective method
■Isn’t one iPhone enough for Rod? Why does he have
two? A closer look at the display shows that one iPhone is
used with US provider AT&T while the other is used with
the British provider Vodafone UK. Wait a second… how
does that work? “Very simple: I have a VPN connection
(Virtual Private Network) to my family in London and
from there I have access to the British mobile telephone
network.” This lets Rod call anyone in Great Britain at
local British rates - and all this from the other side of the
Atlantic!
206 TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 06-07-08/2012 — www.TELE-satellite.com

5. Rod would gladly record more TV Rod is also planning to record the EPG has even more ideas: “You could build
channels: “The goal is to record at a data from BBC. “But they’re not mak- a small adapter and connect it to an
minimum of one TV channel from every ing it easy for me: the BBC sends the LNB and transmit reception data to an
country.” EPG data as a bitmap and not in text iPhone or iPad via Bluetooth. In this
format. I would first need to write a way you wouldn’t need your own signal
But there are limits to what the ‘Inter- program that could read the bitmaps in analyzer; you could use the display and
net Archive’ organization can do: “The OCR.” Rod is always getting new chal- processor power in the iPhone or iPad
amount of data involved is absolutely lenges placed in front of him. And what for the measurements.” Wow, what a
gigantic and every additional channel does he have planned for TSReader? fantastic idea! “Or you could use WiFi
that we continuously record each time instead of Bluetooth”, continues Rod
means a high investment.” Even if the “Last year I made TSReader com- regarding his ideas on the possibilities
foundation that supports ‘Internet Ar- patible with ISDB-T and also adapted with today’s technology. “I’m not sure
chive’ has a lot of money behind it, the it to AIT. Aside from that, TSReader yet if I’ll get involved with that”, grins
resources are still limited. “Any expan- is now also compatible with many dif- Rod.
sion is done with great care.” ferent typesets so that, for example,
Greek and Cyrillic can be properly dis- Rod clearly isn’t short on ideas. His
It’s interesting to note that Rod played.” But it doesn’t stop there: “I examples only prove that there’s still
Hewitt also records the EPG data for just received an e-mail that says there more to be discovered and developed.
‘Internet Archive’. “Here by the win- are still problems with the display of Innovations today are much more than
dow I have a small antenna pointed Slovakian characters.” It’s actually not just possible, you just have to come up
to DishNetwork at 72W. Once a day I really a problem; Rod just needs a cor- with the right ideas.
automatically record all the EPG data. responding data stream so that he can
It takes about 20 minutes before all adapt TSReader with it.
1. Rod’s current project: the mosaic display
the data has been received and it of live video from IPTV channels.
amounts to about 300MB.” The EPG Rod is currently working on a project 2. Many satellite enthusiasts as well as
data contains programming informa- for IPTV: “I’m in the process of writ- digital TV professionals use Rod Hewitt’s
tion for the next nine days. Rod re- ing software that would let you dis- TSReader software. It displays all of
the available PIDs in a data stream plus
cords the data daily on a rolling basis play various IPTV channels in mosaic additional details such as bit rate. FTA
and sends the data on a hard drive to form.” This is an especially interest- channels are displayed in a window. The
the ‘Internet Archive’ headquarters in ing piece of software for IPTV opera- Lite version can be downloaded free of
1 charge from Rod Hewitt’s web site at www.
San Francisco. tors to control their programming. Rod coolstf.com or www.tsreader.com .
2
to record such large amounts of data Rod sat down and began program- ing that TSReader was originally writ-
was through ‘Digital Live Tape DLT’. But ming the first version of his TSReader. ten as a way for Rod to better handle
since at that time is was not yet pos- “I used a commercial satellite receiver the TV channel stream recordings he
sible to record the stream directly, we with ASI output and a professional PC was undertaking for ‘Internet Archive’.
used MPEG encoders to take the digi- card with ASI input; this let me start But there was another side effect to
tally received signals that were output- reading and analyzing the stream.” TSReader: “Since I was always getting
ed in analog by the receiver and recon- He soon adapted his software to an- better at working with the streams, the
vert them back into an MPEG stream.” other PC card that also happened to opportunity arose to also use TSRead-
In just one year this method filled up be popular with private users and thus er to record the TV channels and this
9000 DLT tapes. In 2002 the prices for TSReader 1.0 was born. He made the time using the original stream for these
hard drives fell so far that it became software available as a free download. recordings.”
more cost effective to start using them As a result, many DXers could now eas-
and stop using DLT technology. Since ily analyze the PIDs directly. He real- Rod took some time to test and
then, Rod has been busy copying the ized that professional users were also perfect his software. Finally, in 2008
9000 DLT tapes onto hard drives. “This using his software and one day it was it was time: ‘Internet Archive’ com-
job will keep me busy for quite some suggested by one of these professional pletely converted to recording using
time yet”, sighs Rod. users to expand his software to, for ex- TSReader. “Since then we’ve been
ample, include the playback of video. using my software to record the TV
During the course of recording the “Since then TSReader is available in channels directly to hard drives.” Rod
TV channels, it became evident that three versions: a Lite version for ev- continues, “At ‘Internet Archive’s’
there were blackouts in the recordings. eryone, a standard version and a pro- headquarters in San Francisco is a
What was causing this? Rod was get- fessional version with all the bells and reception and recording station for
ting more and more nervous; some- whistles.” currently 70 channels. Some of these
times he had to search for a long time. channels come from the local cable
“I never knew if my reception system In 2004 Rod took it all online. “In network there and some via satellite.
was the cause or if there was an issue my first year sales were a little slow at I record 22 TV channels here in Mary-
with the uplink or downlink or if it was around 300 licenses.” In 2011 TSRead- land including PBS Annapolis as well as
the channel itself.” He had to find a so- er was accepted: “In this year 6000 WBAL, WJZ, WNUV, WUTB and WPBX.”
lution - he had to be able to read the software licenses were purchased.” Rod simply uses his cable TV connec-
stream directly to find out what was Since some of these licenses were tion in his apartment. “Not only that,
causing the blackouts. “There were valid for more than one PC, the to- we have another reception station in
professional solutions but they were tal users added up to over 10,000.” It London from which we record another
just too expensive.” was quite a success for Rod consider- 15 channels from Europe.
208 TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 06-07-08/2012 — www.TELE-satellite.com www.TELE-satellite.com — 06-07-08/2012 — TELE-satellite International — 全球发行量最大的数字电视杂志 209