ATSC is the standard for OTA broadcast in the US now. It would be nice if support could be built into vdr now. The plugin for getting eit data and scanning for channels hasn't been updated in 2 years. It still has problems. on my x64 system, it seg faults most of the time when trying to scan for channels. It's more of a fluke that when it does work. And boradcasters don't follow the standards or something because I often don't have guide data when a 60$ converter box is able to find guide data.
It would be nice to have its functions moved to VDR and then just dump the plugin. It served it's purpose when ATSC was just starting to be used, but it's time to build it in instead of it being an after thought.