Re: Expensive codecs?

Many inexpensive < $200 DVD players have 5.1 analog outputs (including all
the DVD-Audio and SACD units) and many of them can decode Dolby Digital
and/or DTS and send it out the 5.1 analog outputs. Also there are many
inexpensive AV receivers and el-cheapo Home Theater in a Box (HTIB) units
that decode DTS. I doubt that if it was expensive and required "horsepower"
that they could sell a complete HTIB including receiver,DVD player/changer,
and 6 speakers for $100-$200. While I agree that "typical" cheap DVD players
may not decode DTS, it is probably not because of the expense of the DTS
decoder, but probably because of the expense of adding the extra 5.1 analog
outputs with bass management capability.

Here is an example of a "cheap" DVD player with lots of decoding capability
including DTS,DVD-A,SACD,MP3,WMA,etc. Pioneer DV-578A has a street price of
about $130:

"The DVD-578A-S is a high-performance movie and music machine. In addition
to DVD movies, the slim DV-578A-S plays multi-channel, high-resolution
DVD-Audio and SACD discs, plus all of your recordings on DVD-R/RW*,
CD-R/RW**, MP3, and WMA. It even has a PhotoViewer feature for viewing JPEG
still photos. For sensationally great video, the DV-578A-S features
virtually twice the video processing power of previous models with a
12-bit/108MHz Video D-A converter, our PureCinema 2:3 Progressive Scan, and
a component video output plus 7 video adjustments for maximum versatility
and performance. For great audio, the DV-578A-S has builtin Dolby Digital
and DTS 5.1 decoders. Coaxial and Optical Digital Ouputs for Dolby Digital
and DTSR surround allow for digital output to an A/V Receiver. A high-end
24-bit / 192kHz D/A converter ensures superb audio performance."

Jay

-----Original Message-----
From: Turtle Beach Audiotron User Forum
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chris Dickens
Sent: Friday, January 21, 2005 10:07 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [AT] roku photobridge

I *truly* doubt that your DVD player is decoding any DTS audio.  This is one
of those expensive codecs that most do not implement because of the
horsepower required.  The DVD player is instead passing the digital 1s and
0s through a TOSLINK or Coax digital output for your digital theater
receiver to decode.  The same happens with Dolby Digital, however in the
case of Dolby Digital or PCM (PCM is the raw encoding used by WAV and Red
Book CD), they put enough hardware into the box to decode and downsample
those formats to two channels so that the Left/Right RCA outputs have an
analog signal for people without outboard decoders (ie: a plain television)

My very first DVD player actually did have a complete Dolby Digital decoder
on-board which produced an analog signal out 6 RCA type jacks on the back.
It decoded all 5.1 channels and if your receiver didn't offer a digital
input, but had a 5.1 input (a number of receivers still have one such input)
you could run six RCA style jacks to the receiver for 5.1 surround without
the receiver doing any decoding - essentially a bypass of decoding circuitry
and straight to the speaker amps.  Of course this player also cost me ~$350
some 6 or so years ago.

Andrew is right on this, typical DVD players have very limited decoding
capabilities locked in the MPEG realm.  I however have seen a few knock-off
brand players which are coming down very fast which support MPEG-4,
popularly known as XviD or DivX.  These are the exception and not the norm.

--Chris

-----Original Message-----
Date:    Wed, 19 Jan 2005 23:29:52 -0800
From:    Tim Hill <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: roku photobridge

Er... what? The DVD player I was talking about can decode the following
*audio* formats:

-- Red book CD (raw WAV in effect)
-- MP3 CBR and VBR up to 320 kbps
-- Dolby Digital 5.1 compressed audio
-- DTS compressed audio

All of these are codecs. And of course, so are the examples you cite (ogg
etc). My point was that it's NOT expensive to put codecs in a front-end
these days -- doing so in a back-end "server" is not really necessary, nor
does it scale very well. MIPS are cheap, and the server argument (share
expensive resources) no longer applies to them. What you
*are* left with, on a server, is (a) the advantage of a single, central,
repository for media and (b) the cost reductions when storing very large
amounts of digital content.

When looked at this way, the server stays dumb and the "smarts" are in the
devices.

--Tim

Andrew J wrote:

>> Actually the whole server-side stuff is indeed an issue, with the
>> growing importance of NAS devices. Sure, some of these are
>> "hack-able" by those in the know, but in general adding services to
>> these is difficult. Of course, one can use a PC as an intermediary to
>> the NAS, but that's a pretty ornate setup just to play music.
>
> NAS's are dumb devices that don't do anything other than serve files.
> Yes most are hackable as they run linux, but once again they don't
> have the grunt there like the AT to much more than they were frist
> built for!
>
>> ...and it doesn't cater to manyother needs. I actually have a
>> dedicated server, running Windows Server 2003. While this is not very
>> typical, at present very few of the server-side services run on this
>> OS. So I'm stuck with the audiotron.
>
> ? slimserver does!
>
>> I also don't buy the "codecs are expensive" argument. Last time I
>> looked, there were a whole bunch of codecs in my $95 DVD player (DVD
>> video, DVD Audio, CD, SACD, Dolby Digital, DTS etc etc.).
>
> See your not really talking a codec's here.. You talking about a DVD
> playback, and on DVD playback is DVD video (MPEG2), DVD audio, which
> is Dolby digital or DTS and your talking CD, which is just music, and
> SACD. These are all DVD related things topics and the player SHOULD do
> them.
>
> I'm talking, OGG, flac, mp3, WMA, AC3, itunes etc god know what else
> is going out.
>
> Your chip can't play *ANY* of them!
>
> Andrew