[linux-audio-dev] Any interest in DVD-Audio?

[Alfons Adriaensen]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 08:21:19PM +0000, Dave Chapman wrote:

> Hopefully this is within the scope of this list  but following a lot of
> recent googling, there doesn't appear to be any interest in
> "open-sourcing" anything related to DVD-Audio.
>
> As you may know, commercially authored DVD-Audio disks have three very
> unfriendly features - encryption, watermarking and Meridian Lossless
> Packing (MLP).  I am assuming that these are some of the reasons
> developers have not become interested in DVD-Audio.

Probably very true. It also seems quite difficult to obtain solid
technical info about it.
 
> However, none of those features are compulsory, and if you remove those
> obstacles (which I am not interested in overcoming - simply avoiding),
> you are left with a standard which allows 18 combinations of samplerate
> and sample wordsize for 2-channel stereo audio (including 16-bit/44.1KHz
> RedBook, and going all the way up to 24-bit/192KHz), plus a range of
> 6-channel uncompressed surround sound formats.
> 
> My aim is to produce a set of GPL'd tools to both author, "un-author",
> and play such unencrypted, uncompressed disks, and am curious to know if
> any other developers have an interest in this area or not.

I would certainly be very interested as a user. As a developer I have
no experience at all with things such as cdrecord or cdrdao, so apart
from some knowledge on how people would want to use DVD-A for things
like Ambisonics, I'd probably have little to contribute. BTW, a script
based interface such for cdrdao would be fine for me, don't waste your
time with a GUI (others will do that anyway :-).

> I should reiterate that I'm not interested in investigating features
> such as encryption or MLP - I simply wish to be able to author my own
> unencrypted and uncompressed DVD-Audio disks using my own music, which I
> can then play back either on my hardware DVD-Audio player or on my PC,
> all using free software

The only limitation of not using MLP would be that you can't have six
channels at 24/96.

BTW, do you know the exact status of MLP ? Is patented and do we know 
how it works, or is it a 'trade secret' ?

-- 
FA