Broadcast Driver Architecture
The Broadcast Driver Architecture ( BDA ) is a driver architecture developed by Microsoft for the use of TV and radio receivers ( PCI , PCIe and USB ) under Windows. It transmits the data from a DVB or ATSC tuner in digital form to the application software and is currently the standard. Manufacturers of DVB software therefore only need to build support for BDA into their software so that they can be used with any DVB hardware for which a BDA driver is available. This then takes over the connection between the hardware and the BDA interface of the software. With the meanwhile widespread use of BDA, this has the advantage for the user that he can use almost any DVB hardware with any program on the market for viewing digital television that BDA supports. He is therefore not bound to the software supplied and can choose the software whose operation and range of functions he likes best. Only the implementation of DiSEqC is not completely standardized in BDA, so that developers of DVB software have to adapt their program, especially for DiSEqC versions other than 1.0, for the individual TV card manufacturers.
For the reception of data streams via DVB (e.g. internet access via satellite ), network functions are supported that allow the integration of DVB-PCI cards as normal network cards .
BDA's predecessor is Video for Windows (VFW) .
Application software that requires BDA drivers is, for example, Windows XP Media Center Edition .
The PBDA ( Protected Broadcast Driver Architecture ) enables encryption of the transmission as copy protection .