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Abstract

A decoding system and method for a plurality of transport streams, such as MPEG-2 encoded data streams, in which, in addition to a transport decoder, a predecoder is provided for extracting program specific information (PSI) from the plurality of transport streams. Consequently, in the event of a channel change requiring a different transport stream to be decoded, the PSI is made immediately available to the transport decoder eliminating the delay of waiting for applicable packets in the transport stream to extract the PSI prior to decoding and presenting a program to a user. A fully populated crossbar switch controlled by a micro-controller is used to feed a selected transport stream to the transport decoder and to cause the plurality of transport streams to be successively fed to the predecoder. The extracted PSI may also used by the channel mapping function of the decoding system to maintain a map of channels and associated PSI for the entire plurality of transport streams accessible by the decoding system.

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