We present a near-optimal blind decision feedback equalizer (DFE) for Advanced Television Systems Committee digital television (DTV) receivers. By adopting a modified trellis decoder (MTD) with trace back depth of 1 for the decision device In the DFE, we obtain a hardware-efficient near-optimal blind DFE approaching to the optimal DFE which has no error propagation. The MTD uses absolute distance instead of Euclidean distance for computation of a path metric, resulting. In reduced computational complexity. Comparing to the conventional slicer, the MTD shows outstanding performance improvement of decision error probability and is comparable to the original trellis decoder using Euclidean distance. Reducing error propagation in the DFE leads to the improvement of convergence performance in terms of convergence speed and residual error. Simulation results show that the proposed blind DFE performs much better than the blind DFE with the slicer.