Re: Expensive codecs?

Inexpensive?  $199 is nearly 4 times the price of an average DVD
player unit being sold at your local Best Buy.  I would hardly
consider this inexpensive for someone to buy a DVD player with
on-board DACs rather than just outputting to their digital home
theater receiver which they'll invariably own and already implements
this functionality.

The Pioneer model you mention indeed seems like a nice unit, don't
get me wrong, but it's definitely the exception and not the norm
these days.

All I'm saying is, that for such a limited use feature to be
implemented in hardware without a powerful "General Use" CPU (like an
Intel, AMD or PowerPC processor for example) would cost a significant
amount of effort on the part of hardware vendors when the target
audience will be so miniscule.  The unit would cost orders of
magnitude more just because they wouldn't sell many.  As you can see,
Voyetra has discontinued it's Auditron.  This tells me that they have
tested the market and for an all-inclusive unit, the money just isn't
there.  Like it or not, a lot of people apparently don't mind leaving
a host PC online all of the time to decode their music and the end
result is that these people can leverage the CPU power they already
own and have format freedom. :|

--Chris

-----Original Message-----
Date:    Fri, 21 Jan 2005 11:55:48 -0500
From:    Jay Erndl <[email protected]>
Subject: 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