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

[Dave Chapman]

Jens M Andreasen wrote:
> We are drifting away here, but Dave Chapmans original considerations
> still makes sense in the context of a theater or otherwise acoustically
> controlled environment. The most likely outcome is that DVD-A/SACD will
> be abondoned completely, and replaced with userfriendly formats.

I'm not sure what you mean by userfriendly.  If you remove MLP and the
encryption, then I would consider DVD-Audio as havng the potential to be
very user-friendly.  There is no need to create a new format - just
"open" an existing one.

Yes, the official specs are "secret", but so were the DVD-Video specs,
and that didn't stop the Linux DVD-player authors.  A DVD-A shares many
of the same concepts (and very similar data structures) to a DVD-V, and
I've already started to document a fair amount of the structure of a
DVD-A here:

http://dvd-audio.sourceforge.net/spec.shtml

A very useful "feature" is that even on encrypted commercial DVD-As, the
.IFO files are not encrypted - only the .AOB and .VOB files are.

And the recent news about the reverse-engineering of ALAC (and other
codecs in the past) casts doubt on the fact that MLP will remain
proprietory forever.

Dave.