Communication system for providing a transport entity with mutually related objects

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION In the communication system according to FIG.
1, a broadcast server 2 is coupled to a broadcast network 4.
To the broadcast network 4, terminals 6, 8 and 10 are connected.
The input signal of terminal 10 is applied to a receiver 12 which deals with tuning, amplification, demodulation and detection of the input signal, and presents an MPEG-2 transport stream to a processor 14.
The constitution of an MPEG-2 transport stream is described in the ISO/IEC MPEG-2 standard which in incorporated by reference herein.
The processor 14 is arranged for extracting the desired information from the MPEG transport stream including the transport entities comprising the plurality of mutually related objects.
Said plurality of mutually related objects is broadcasted periodically in order to enable the processor to receive said objects independent from the moment the processor is switched on.
The processor is also arranged for processing the mutually related objects and presenting the result on a display 16b and playing associated audio via the audio system 18.
FIG.
2 shows the relevant protocols and part of their details involved in the transmission system according to the invention.
In the server the MHEG protocol is used to define the objects to be used by the MHEG virtual machine in the client to realize the desired application.
According to the inventive concept of the present invention, a plurality of related objects 20, 22, 24 and 26 is combined into a combined transport entity by an Object Combiner 28.
In the present embodiment of the invention this combined transport entity is a file.
The file comprises a header in which the header size, the version number and the sizes of the included objects are given.
The Header size is represented by an 8 bit number.
Said number indicates the size of the header in bytes.
The Version number is represented by 8 bits.
The Object size is represented by a 16 bit number which indicates the size of the corresponding object in bytes