Many thanks to John and Bob!


Originally Posted by Mark_H
The downside of *only* including PCM, rather than a lossless compression, though is that it eats up space which could be given to video... for that reason I'd hope lossless codecs continue to be used...

I suspect they will be. I think the majority get that, in order to try and coax people into upgrading they simply have to sell the format on both its visual and sonic superiority over DVD, along with all the special feature “enhancements” they like to babble on about.

Right now we`ve got every major studio bar one (Warner Brothers and soon New Line now that WB have swallowed them whole) consistently using a lossless codec on all their releases. Sony, The Weinstein Co and Paramount/Dreamworks favour TrueHD on everything. Fox/MGM, Lionsgate and Universal favour DTS HD Master Audio. Criterion are going with DTS HD MA for multi-channel mixes and PCM for mono/stereo presentations and a lot of the smaller and independent distributors are providing lossless too. Disney straddle between PCM and Dolby TrueHD (appearing to use the latter when they might be concerned about PCM robbing the image and special features of too much capacity and bandwdith. They will likely "do a Sony" and eventually move on form PCM to TrueHD entirely).

If all studios were acting like Warner, i.e being very selective about what titles get lossless audio (and constantly making their tracks 16bit like Warner always do, even if a master was 24bit) then I'd be more concerned about how serious a future lossless audio presentation had. Right now, the vast majority of distributors are treating it as an essential part of their product.


Last edited by DanielB; 2008-09-15 13:53.