Methods for operating an adaptive receiver for receiving a selected DTV signal, which can be either a quadrature-amplitude-modulation (QAM) signal or a vestigial sideband (VSB) signal. The adaptive receiver includes adaptive symbol decoding circuitry for adaptively decoding baseband signal encoded in different signal formats at selected different code rates to provide a decoded output signal, an adaptive deinterleaver for deinterleaving the decoded output signal in accordance with a deinterleaving function selected from a plurality of deinterleaving functions, and an adaptive error decoder for detecting and correcting errors in the deinterleaver output signal.