The reader of this document is required to have some knowledge in the area of digital video broadcasting (DVB) and should be familiar with part I of the MPEG2 specification ISO/IEC 13818 (aka ITU-T H.222), i.e you should know what a program/transport stream (PS/TS) is and what is meant by a packetized elementary stream (PES) or an I-frame.

Various DVB standards documents are available from http://www.dvb.org/ and/or http://www.etsi.org/.

It is also necessary to know how to access unix/linux devices and how to use ioctl calls. This also includes the knowledge of C or C++.