26 Aug
2003
26 Aug
'03
6:36 p.m.
On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 10:05:37 -0700, kevin ernste wrote:
In the studio I work in, we do DVD-A authoring under
another OS with a
standard $300 4x Pioneer DVD-R/RW and have done up to 8 channels of
24/96 using something called Meridian Lossless Packing
(http://www.ambisonic.net/mlp.html). The software is rather spendy,
but nothing near $4K.
MLP is patented 6 was to sunday, I doubt your going to see a free
implementation anytime soon. Its possible that as a comminity we could
licence the format, but I suspect we would still have to pay a per seat
licence fee, so it would not be free or Free.
The software implementation Meridian sell costs about EUR2500. I'm
actually very supprised that the Pioneer box does realtime MLP coding
because as I understand it (war stories from someone in the film industry)
the first pass doesnt always succeed, sometimes you need to discard some
information before it can squeeze the audio into the (fixed) audio
bandwidth allocation. Maybe this stage has been automated, or the DVD-A
spec allows more bandwidth.
Theres more info here: http://www.meridian-audio.com/p_mlpenc.htm
Meridian are more famous for selling /very/ expensive hifi equipment
FWIW.
- Steve