Ensemble Transport Interface

The Ensemble Transport Interface (ETI) is a standardised (see ETSI: EN 300 799) output stream from a DAB/DAB+/T-DMB multiplexer. It consists of a 2 Mbit/s synchronous stream. The Network adaptation is defined for G.703 lines (E1) that is the typical physical interface used between the multiplexer and DAB OFDM modulator.

The ETI stream can also be recorded to a file for capture and replay.

WorldDAB developed an adaptation of ETI for IP, called EDI (Encapsulated DAB Interface), which is specified in ETSI: TS 102 693.

ETI Layers

The main layer is ETI-LI, it contains 24 ms frame of DAB multiplex data. This logical frame may be encapsulated into:

• ETI-NI (G.703) - The simplest transport interface (just added sync words at the beginning and padding at the end). It has a fixed packet size of 6144 Bytes, and fixed bitrate of 2 Mbit/s.
• ETI-NI (V.11) - Same as G.703 but with variable frame size and bitrate.
• ETI-NA (G.704) - More complex encapsulation method for E1/T1 interface. Has a fixed bitrate of 2 Mbit/s (with all overhead) and Reed-Solomon forwarded error correction code 226 or 235 of 240 bytes. The packet size is fixed to 5592 or 5376 bytes (depending of error correction mode). This layer is used for satellite distribution of DAB stream.

ETI satellite distribution

Some provides are distributing ETI streams by encapsulation of it into MPEG-TS. That streams may also be:

• Not bit-aligned to transport stream.
• May be inverted.
• The Transport stream may be simulated by adding only 0x47 TS-sync byte at the beginning of each 188 byte packed, and the rest of it - is ETI-NA.
• May be other than pure DVB-S or DVB-S2 (for example DVB-GSE).
• May be EDI.

A list of (known) DAB streams over satellite can be found at https://github.com/piratfm/eti-tools#satellite-dab-feeds . All of them are not encrypted.

ETI conversion to http

To convert ETI-NI stream to HTTP (ready to icecast2) ni2out application from eti-tools may be used.

Tools

• CRC ETI Streamer: tool developed by CRC for replaying ETI file on an E1/G.703 card
• eti-tools: ETI extractor from MPEG-TS and NA-to-NI converter and HTTP-icecast streamer.
• tsniv2ni: Converts TS ETI V.11 streams to ETI NI G.703.
• etisnoop: The ETISnoop analyser decodes a RAW ETI file and prints out its contents in YAML for easier analysis.
• dablin: Plays eti files from file or stdin, the GTK GUI version supports Dynamic Label and MOT Slideshow (if applicable).
• eti-stuff: A collection of programmes to generate ETI files from various hardware like RTLSDR sticks, Airspy, etc.
• dabtools (forked): dab2eti receives a DAB ensemble and outputs an ETI stream to stdout, unfortunately only for RTLSDR sticks