The present document specifies a new VBI standard to be added to MPEG-2 and DVB to handle the transmission of data intended to be transcoded into the VBI of MPEG-2 decoded video. The definitions given by the present document are an extension of the format specified by EN 300 472 [2].

The extensions include Inverted Teletext, VPS (EN 300 231 [4]) and WSS (EN 300 294 [5]) data to be used for 625-line systems and Closed-Captioning (EIA-608 Revision A [6]) data to be used for 525-line systems. Also, a generic format for transmitting luminance-only VBI data is defined to have a means of coping with other standard or non-standard VBI systems.

The present document allows for conveying VBI data units and EBU Teletext data units using the same elementary stream. Backwards compliance with the EN 300 472 [2] is guaranteed, as the EBU Teletext as specified in EN 300 472 [2] and VBI data as specified in the present document can co-exist in the same service on separate PIDs. To cater for this, some extensions to the SI, EN 300 468 [9] have been defined.