The present disclosure relates to a reception apparatus and method, a transmission apparatus and method, and a program, capable of obtaining desired communication quality. Under the control of a central control unit, a tactile signal generation unit generates a tactile signal of a necessary number. Under the control of the central control unit, a header generation unit generates header information including the presence or absence of the tactile signal (that is, information indicating whether or not the tactile signal is to be used for each of vibration units as information associated with the vibration unit that uses the tactile signal), the delay amount, and the magnitude. A signal coupling unit adds header information to each of the tactile signals from the tactile signal generation unit, and performs time-division multiplexing on each of the tactile signals to which the header information has been added. The present disclosure can be applied to a tactile presentation system that vibrates a wearable reception apparatus including the vibration unit, for example.

There is provided a transmission signal to enable tactile presentation at more positions than the number of channels of a tactile vibration signal that can be transmitted. The transmission signal includes audio signals of a predetermined number of channels and tactile presentation signals of a predetermined number of channels and to which metadata designating the tactile presentation position targeted by each of the tactile presentation signals of the predetermined number of channels is added is generated. The transmission signal is transmitted to a reception side via a predetermined transmission path. For example, the metadata is dynamically changed to dynamically change the tactile presentation position targeted by each of the tactile presentation signals of the predetermined number of channels.

A method of reducing jitter in transmission of a timestamp across a clock domain boundary includes storing N timestamps, generated in N successive clock cycles of an origin clock domain, in N parallel buffers in the origin clock domain under control of a modulo-N counter, transmitting outputs of the N parallel buffers across the clock domain boundary into a destination clock domain along with the modulo-N counter, processing the modulo-N counter in the destination clock domain to derive a selection signal that selects a stable timestamp from among the outputs of the N parallel buffers, and outputting the selected stable timestamp. The modulo-N counter may be Gray-coded modulo-N counter to reduce jitter in the modulo-N counter across the clock domain boundary.

Disclosed is a method for communication, according to a TDMA protocol, between a master device and at least one slave device, during which a plurality of frames are transmitted between the master device and the slave device, each frame being partitioned into a plurality of time intervals, at least one time interval having an analogue synchronization signal having an amplitude regulation portion in the form of a sine wave having a constant amplitude over a number of predetermined pulses, and an optimized synchronization portion in the form of a triangular amplitude modulation of the sine wave so as to determine a reference time.

A communication apparatus includes: an encoder that generates a packet of a time division duplex (TDD) communication system, the packet including a high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) signal; and a communication unit that transmits the packet to a communication partner device for each of a plurality of divided periods obtained by dividing one TDD burst period in the TDD communication system.