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MP3...in Surround Sound
A number of people sent in the latest news from the fine folks at Frauhofer that they are expecting to have surround sound working for MP3s by July. The details are pretty sketchy in the article, but supposedly it won't be much more space per MP3s, and existing players will work with it.
Whats this mean for the Ipod? Firmware upgrade? I was going to buy but if I should wait for a 4th gen Dolby 5.1 edition to come out I will.
Does your collection already have surround sound data? A bit pointless to convert, no new data to store.
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
But you only have two ears!
MP3 is an outdated CODEC, the only reason it's still in use is because of compatibility. If you start adding extra features that break compatibility people will just move to a better quality CODEC with the same features (and possibly more).
You couldn't convert your mp3's to surround because the source is stereo... if you want surround just run it through PL2 for pretty good on the spot surround sound.
What would be the point of converting?
You'd just add extra headers and increase file size. If you want to dynamically alter sounds in 3d space dependant on temporal and frequency factors a plugin might be more appropriate. How often do you listen to all of your mp3 collection?
I don't know why you'd need to change anything... I get surround sound right now with my ordinary stereo MP3s. It's called Dolby Pro Logic :-)
So you can have over sibilant vocals in front of you, warbly underwater bass behind you, and audio artefacts moving in circles about your head... I can't wait!
It doesn't read like you'll be able to convert existing MP3's because they would not have the information needed to create the extra audio channels. Looks like I'll need to reencode my entire cd collection...again. Fawk.
I suppose there isn't enough detail in the article to ask whether anyone knows if this could be applied to OGG?
Ogg Vorbis have had support for this for some while.
What I'm not sure of is if the support for "joint" surround is there. (Like joint stereo, only for surround)
Who wants to use a proprietary sound format, when they can use a much more appealing open format.
...surround sound was encoded on the two stereo channels. At least I thought that was how it worked up until Dolby Pro-Logic wasn't the latest thing anymore and you had digital connections from the source to the AC-3 or Dolby Digital receiver or whatever. (I haven't kept up...)
I just assumed that the surround channels were basically a diff between the right and left channel and the center was a sum.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Now, if only you can get MP3's to play in quad, and go KERCHUNK every few minutes, and my 8-track flashback to 1973 will be complete!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Vorbis is also intended for lower and higher sample rates (from 8kHz telephony to 192kHz digital masters) and a range of channel representations (monaural, polyphonic, stereo, quadraphonic, 5.1, ambisonic, or up to 255 discrete channels)
h tml
http://xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/doc/vorbis-spec-intro.
Maybe "multichannel" would be a more appropriate description.
MP3 is already proprietary.
MP3 is and was always proprietary...
Excellent. Now we can have Divx encoded video with mp3 encoded-full-surround-sound audio for our ripped DVDs.
Mind you full surround can be encoded as 6 channel AAC already, pairs up nicely with Xvid video encoding, and can be done in a few easy steps on OS X, (directions here) so I've never looked into other ways of doing it. Maybe someone out there already does it in surround on windows (nah, maybe on Linux) .
Is this the release which includes DRM. Surround sound could be cool though.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Your original mp3s are in stereo and not in surround, so you wont win anything by converting them to the new format as far as I understand it. They would still be stereo (converting from mono to stereo doesn't either make the sound stereo). This new format would just mean that you could make mp3s with surround sound in the future.
Tell me if I'm wrong.
I demand the Cone of Silence!
Fraunhofer reproduces surround sound by adding to MP3 encoding extra information that describes the spatial characteristics of the main audio track.
If they are just adding information to the main track, why put that information in the file to begin with? Just let the user have a "spatial" encoder plug-in that jacks into winamp or whatever. Doing it this way increases the file size for everybody... people with and without surround systems.
Surround information should not be "created." It should be ripped and converted from the original source.
Before long we'll have the mp3 mess that we currently have with all the video codecs.
Davak
Stop spamming /. with your stupid moderation links. Thanks.
Hmmm... this might be a good time for then to try to 'enhance' the MP3 standard by adding in DRM as the various **AA's (damn them to Heck!) have been urging for years.
I think I'll sit out on this one thank you very much. I like music and everything, but stereo is more than adequate for me (If I want 6 channel sound, I'll just watch a DVD...)
Finally Frauhofer will catch up to the innovation that Microsoft made more than a year ago. (Oh the irony) Windows Media could do this since its last realease. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9ser ies/Gettingstarted/DemoCenter/AudioQuality.asp?pag e=6&lookup=AudioQuality
Was MS first to have this technology for the mainstream consumer???
Hmm, how does your audio format get any more proprietary than before when the folks who developed it in the first place extend it?
Don't suppose Qsound was ever going to catch on here...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
FooBar2000 already has plugin's available that can do this too...
www.foobar2000.com for details.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Grandparent is essentially right. MP3 *is* an outdated codec, which is only still here because of it's universality (don't get me wrong - this is a big benefit). While these added features may not actually break the old standard, they do result in bigger files with no discernable benefit for the vast majority of people. If you want to examine the success of previous add-ons to the mp3 standard, take mp3-pro - it's not exactly all over the place. People will take standard mp3 for it's universality, and choose a superior codec (AAC, OGG, MPC, whatever - even WMA) when they aren't concerned about compatibility.
Not very surprising. Considering that both AAC and Ogg Vorbis (and possibly flac, but I can not find the page) support 5.1.(search for 'surround')
Heck, I would not be surprised if apple will push some kind of 5.1 headphones, and thus claim superiority over mp3 for portable music format.
But then again, why do I care? I do not even listen to music, and video is already AC3 (aka dolby digital surround?) encoded.
badness 10000
Now you'll only need 2 computers to listen to Zaireeka !
Here's the deal.
By far, the most popular algorithm in use for surround sound encoding is Dolby's AC3 (I can say this, because it's on pretty much every DVD, and nothing comes close to its penetration even in the audio space -- not even DVD-Audio). AC3 itself is a pretty fascinating codec; one of the more interesting things about it is that each additional channel requires less and less bandwidth to tack on. This is because there tends to be massive correlation between channels -- either the same sound is coming from multiple directions, or a sound is coming from one direction and all the others are silent, or some combination therein. AC3 encodes this quite efficiently, and thus gets really high quality surround sound in surprisingly few bits.
I suspect they're engineering a similar mode for MP3 -- hopefully something a little nicer than Joint Stereo, which basically works by doing a mono mix and specifying which frequencies are louder in which channel. No, this doesn't work very well. Concievably, we could see something like VBR on a per-channel basis, but I suspect this would cause existing decoders to collapse. I do believe it's possible to place extra data between MP3 granules; I suppose they'll get their backwards compatible surround mode worked into there.
--Dan
Not to mention how the method of adding pretend "surround sound" that they're proposing is retarded.
For what it's worth, MP3Pro also wasn't really backwards-compatible, even though it claimed to be. In a format that didn't support the extensions, it cut off the entire high end and it sounded like absolute shit. It remains to be seen if the same issue will be seen in these surround MP3s, but if it really doesn't add too much, like the article is implying, I don't imagine it will be a cataclysmic failure.
Besides, there aren't that many surround-sound audio CDs to rip yet, so something like this wouldn't gain in popularity until a more popular codec has already superseded it. I wouldn't worry about it gaining any type of dominance.
With HD space getting cheap, maybe it's best to just leave the redbook audio in pure WAV format. Screw compression of any type, especially if your after high quality audio reproduction.
Life is not for the lazy.
1) Make sure your generation of ipod is compatible with the update
2) If you don't want to use iTunes to manage your ipod, don't update past 2.0.1
3) If any Apple software asks you to "configure" something on your ipod, keep in mind that is Apple jargon for "format"
Dolby Surround (the type found on VHS tapes) works similarly. It just contains data on what frequencies to spread out to what speakers or something. It's not true surround sound.
Karma: Excellent (fuck, even in the future moderation doesn't work!)
Already have surround sound from (well encoded) mp3's for years using matrix decoders like dolby prologic. Sounds great and no need for bigger mp3's.
Works great with headphones, even works sometimes with Speakers
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
This is great. Now I can listen to all those surround sound albums from my favorite groups like, um, er, well, and there's uh...
Is there anyone recording music in surround sound? Certainly there's no CD spec for this yet...and when there is you can bet it'll be equipped with DRM shackles...
Anyone know how discrete the channels are? "Surround Sound" Codecs often do not support fully discrete channels. If I remember correctly, Dolby ProLogic is four channels encoded in two audio channels and doesn't support fully discrete surround channels. I think to a lessor extent this is also true of Dolby Digital (AC3) (Combines channels at frequencies above 15kHz), but DTS does support fully discrete surround channels (This is part of the reason why DTS uses more bandwidth than AC3). Anyone know if the surround implementation for MP3's will support fully discrete surround channels?
They are still called Frau n hofer Society.
No one will give a flying fuck about MP3+DRM, but if they add it at the same time as multi channel surround sound support they might be able to get people to use it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
> With HD space getting cheap, maybe it's best to just leave the redbook audio in pure WAV format.
> Screw compression of any type, especially if your after high quality audio reproduction.
If you are going down that route, you should use one of the lossless audio compressions, like flac:
" FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see links to the right for supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file."
Flac Homepage
Sig out of date
MP3 with 6 channels or more will be really good (and useful), i don't know why you think people use mp3 _only_ for CD rips.. I'm sure DVD rippers will be pleased with this news.. as most of them don't like using AC3 for its size, and won't use ogg vorbis either coz of other issues.
we'll wait and see what happens later
And the iPod would have to have a model resembling the famous Panasonic "dynamite plunger" player
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
You basically have two ways to achieve this ; the most obvious, but also the most inelegant one being simply saving multiple tracks in the file. I think they will rather use a multiplexing algorithm dealing with phasis and frequency similarities between the tracks ; that's why it shouldn't be that space-consuming.
But it is exactly what the Ogg Vorbis is working on. Please, don't adopt this standard ; I am sick of patents and licenses issues on video and audio codecs and algorithms. The industry will probably choose the MP3, because they feel more confident with protected formats, as well as with proprietary softwares. But this doesn't mean they make good choices. The MP3's first aim was voice encoding, not music one ; but it was choosen even instead of better solutions.
Why the f#ck do we need a PORTABLE surround-sound music format?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
From the article, again:
There's no extra channels, just an extra layer telling the player how to manipulate the two existing audio channels to obtain a surround-like effect. While the merits of this approach alone make me skeptical, what really bothers me about this is how different players are all going to have completely different implementations of using this extra layer of data to manipulate the audio channels, meaning we're going to have no consistency whatsoever with how it even sounds.
First adding 4 channels of information CANNOT lead to the same size or even size close to a stereo file without further compressing or degrading the other four channels (5.1 is actually 6 channels, one reserved for anything below 80Hz). The original file will still be 6 x 16bits/44.1KHz (in the digital world silence and restricted frequencies take as much space as anything else), how can you bring that to more or less the equivalent of 2 x 16bits/44.1KHz ? Further compression or degradation, or a different magical codec nobody know of, hence it wouldn't be mp3.
Surround sound for music is beyond ridiculous for 3 reasons:
-Your iPod, walkman, portable cd player or whatever only uses two drivers to deliver the sound for one very simple reason, you only have two ears, until some form of funny looking hat bearing 5 speakers and a subwoofer emerged it is going to stay like that.
-People can hardly place two speakers adequately (yes even you), stereo-wise it's bad but not as much as badly placing 6 speakers which will lead to serious phase cancellation and accousitic image distortion, translated into, it will sound bad, very bad. Most music recorded in 5.1 uses the surround only for ambiance and/or crowd noises anyways. Remember that listening to a movie in a badly placed 5.1 setup isn't as bad as music since it isn't use to deliver content as a whole but content as several discrete informations.
-Bringing multichannel audio down to two channels leads to serious phase cancellation and again accousitic image distortion, not to mention, distortion (adding two channels togheter ups the amplitude by 3dB, summing 5.1 into 2 leads to an increase of around 6dB per channel), which, to be avoided will require even more processing.
Good luck with their new codec extension, but I hardly believe anyone but the deaf geek will be impressed by it
sometimes less is more
Maybe there is confusion about the naming and what the article means exactly.
Surround sound is the technique to make stereo come from different directions. Either using virtual surround by splitting by frequency range or using additional information, like Dolby Surround with its phase encoding.
DTS and dolby digital 5.1 shouldn't be called surround, they are multichannel sound.
Ogg and WMA 9 both support multichannel sound. Of course all stereo formats support surround (dolby) as long as the phase information hasn't been lost (some modes of joint stereo do this).
It would need a new connector, because you can only get stereo stereo from the iPod as far as I can tell.
For a surround output to an audio system, you would need a new connector offering at least 4 channels (Front L/R, rear L/R), line level. They'd probably make it straight-up 5.1, though.
And how do you get surround sound from a pair of headphones with only with a left and right channel?Easily. Headphones have two channels (L/R), you have two ears (L/R). Your brain does some pretty heavy duty phase analysis to figure out where a sound is coming from. In fact, binaural recording is a technique where two microphones (L/R) are mounted on a form resembling the human head, but you need to wear headphones for the full effect.
A portable device could either use 4 channel headphones (expensive, requires 4 amplifiers to drive them, would increase battery consumption) or could use a DSP integrated circuit to decode the surround sound channels, perform the phase analysis done by the human brain, and send this synthetic binaural signal to regular headphones.
But it's still a lot of work for little payoff. Most of the use for surround sound in any form is movies. Music tends to be mixed to 2 channels from the perspective of a listener sitting in front of the stage, so I think its importance in a portable device primarily used for music is pretty limited.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
There is no "data" in the track. The decoder basicaly just dumps everything in-phase to the center speaker and everything out of phase to the rear.
(And of course you can encode from FLAC to MP3, Vorbis, AAC, or whatever audio format your portable device supports.. when you upgrade your portable player, you can reencode your music to keep up with it, too.)
Lossless is the One True Way for storing music on a PC.
So small it fits in your anus and uses a methane-powered fuel cell.
Beats running out of batteries... But not by much.
I don't see why they would put the time into their "teenager" codec to put surround sound support into it. Especially when mp3 is mainly used for music and isn't technically for video. Where as they could have spent the time to hammer out multichannel support for aac, so then mpeg4 would have multichannel support. So then they'd have a codec for video AND a codec used for just audio with multichannel support. The only thing i see this good for is Xvix and Divx videos. While these can be encoded with AC3 5.1 support, its rare that anyone does it. They usually opt for VBR MP3 with an average bitrate of 192k. So now it looks like they can use mp3 still and get the 5.1 Cmon mplayer! make sure you get support fast.. my xbox needs it!
You're referring to Dolby Pro Logic. Dolby has a couple of surround methods...
This sig intentionally left justified.
One of the places Ogg Vorbis has become surprisingly popular is in soundtracks for computer games. The no licensing fees must be one useful aspect,
No licencing fees doesn't mean just that. It also means no overhead like getting a licencing deal set up, signed, making sure it's paid on time, in right amount, used only in accordance with the terms and so on. I'm seeing this first hand how much time is spent fiddling.
Just the process of going to someone with the authoroty to sign contracts and spend money in the company's name is wasting time, and time is money. That everyone, everywhere can use it for whatever is in itself probably worth as much as the licencing costs themselves.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Desperate to innovate, I came up with an encoding system that added about an extra 50-150K to your average individual song - whether it be on MP3 or CD. The system would allow a studio to encode a simulation of surround audio (frequency modulation and level/gain sends to 5.1 (6) channels). I had even devised a decoding system for CD players that would only require a firmware upgrade.
The system had a full discrete six channels and an analog-like (0-256) degree of control, but did not alter the format of either CDs or MP3s - they still function as normal in any player.
I scrapped it due to lack of funding, plus SACD Hybrid is a good enough technology as it is. I only wish I had followed through with the patent application.
SIMSET will live on in memory. God rest its soul.
as soon as all these companiesthat made my mp3 hardware release firmware upgrades to play ogg I'm there...
but I dont see my audiotrons, my pioneer car stereo, and my portables getting ogg support in the next 10,000 years so Mp3 it is.. and the same stance is held by millions of other consumers that also shelled out gobs of cash for mp3 enabled devices..
I dont care what is better, I care about what works in my equipment. if they come out with blue-ray uber DVD players tommorow almost 90% of the population would not buy one.. they have a working DVD player and only recently converted their video collection... they are not happy about, nor willing to do it all over again.
expect the current DVD standard to live as long as or even longer than VHS did.. same with mp3's.. there is so much hardware out there that play's them it will not go away.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Remember MP3? It's back! In Pog form.
</sarcasm>
Curiously, when you put two drivers inside the same can and seal it over a single ear, there is no opportunity to perform phase analysis. Not saying 4-channel 'phones don't exist (though Google doesn't seem to know of any)... nope, just saying the market is probably limited to people that buy penis enlargement pills from spamvertisments.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Ok, who's going to write the SACD ripper? lol
I have a $10,000 stereo in my truck, and mp3 sounds waaayyyyyy better to me than wma, wma brings out more of the high end of the audio, losses in midrange and bass are evident to me. Variable Bit-Rate Mp3's sound nothign short of amazing, full range of sound. However, what sounds even better is the actual cd, and my brand new SACD Hybrid's (even though I dont have a player that can read the second layer of the discs) :(
Fraunhofer reproduces surround sound by adding to MP3 encoding extra information that describes the spatial characteristics of the main audio track.
Using this extra information helps MP3 players recreate the surround sound effect.
Pfft. Glorified "expand stereo". We don't need this. A DSP would handle it just fine.. even a lot of built in motherboard sound chipsets have an "expand stereo" slider nowadays. This is pretty much worthless.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Call me a communist, but the codec mess we have with video is atually a good thing.
If not for the codec mess, the high-quality, high-compression codecs never would have become as popular as they are, and we would still be using MPEG 1 and Microsoft AVI for all our video.
But we had REAL, a crappy format with high compression, VIVO, an even crappier format with higher compression, Quicktime, a high-quality format with fair compression, leading to MPEG 4, a high quality, high compression and ultimately reverse-engineered-to-hell codec that is now, more or less, open in the DivX and XviD codecs.
Windows Media notwithstanding.
I think most people will miss the point entirely on this matter. MP3's of bands and music recordings, etc., will have absolutely no use for this tech. Where people will see the benefit is when ripping DVD's and encoding AVI files. The best, and smallest, format for AVI audio is MP3. This will enable people to encode MP3s at, say, 160kbps, and also have surround sound. I find this to be quite exciting. I know, I'm a dork.
Listen to my experimental-industrial-techno!
You're right about the utter lack of ogg support, and the fact that mp3 succeeds because it's everywhere and easy (and cheap) to get your hands on.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
See ISO13818-3 which describes MPEG2-audio (which is an extention of the original mpeg audio standard - iso 11172)
ISO13818 describes
* the Low Sampling Frequency extensions (which describe encoding mpeg audio at 16/22.05/24 kHz). This is already incorporated in most encoders.
* 3/2-stero+LFE (Section 0.2.3.2 describes the various configurations e.g. 3/2, 3/1, etc)
For a very brief moment when I had too much time, I worked on getting the multichannel stuff working in tooLame (the layer2 mpeg audio encoder) and the way it works is this:
1. The encoder works out the overall bitrate for all the channels (X bits)
2. The encoder assigns some bits (Y) to be used for the backwards compatible 2-channel stereo so that all compliant decoders will work. Y gt X. (The way the 5 channels are crosstalked and cancelled out to get 2 stereo channels is complex. Read the standard if you want more info).
3. There will then be Z bits (Z=X-Y) left over for the storage of the other channels. (Referred to as "Ancillary data").
4. The beginning of the mpeg audio frame has a flag set so that compliant decoders know about the extra info.
5. Old decoders won't grok the flag, and so they'll just read the stereo info, skip over all the extra info and then find the next bit of data they do understand.
The outcome of all this is that you may have a 512kbps mpeg audio stream which contains 256kbps of the stereo information and then 256kbits of "extra" info that is used to reconstruct the full 3/2 channels of sound.
There is a problems with this however. Compliant MPEG audio streams have a maximum bitrate as set out in the original MPEG1 standard (11172). For example, the maximum total bitrate of a 44.1kHz mp3 file is 1011 kbps. However, when you do really high bitrate multichannel stuff, you can exceed this limit: in this case, the MPEG2 standard suggests using another file to store the information (referred to as the "extension bitstream").
Hope this helped someone.
later
mike
Cool, but useless.
and you are 100% right about the blu-ray... but it wont happen that way.
I have a gigantic Laserdisc collection. I bought one of the Pioneer Laserdisc players that would also play DVD's so I could do the crossover to the new format when it arrived... my setup was 10X the price of a regular Laserdisc player and only a little more than a stand alone DVD player at that time.
the bigest problem is that most manufacturers will NOT make these combo units except in their high end line... which will make the home user stay away from it.
anyways, if the most common television will NOT display a significant different that true HD content Disc will deliver then the peopel wont buy it... Just like SACD and DVD audio are suffering horribly. People are NOT buying them.
if they make most every blu-ray player play all old dvd content... then yes, it will work.. but without that it will be pretty darned doomed.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'd think this surround mp3 was targeted more for home use. At home, I have a MUCH more high ended system that for a portable, and as such...why would I want to use a lossy format for that?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I have your comment in metamod, with a +1 insightful. I will metamod it unfair, because although it is informative, your comment is at best Offtopic in the context of this story.
What you are describing is multichannel, what the story is talking about is surround sound, or simulating the fact that the sound comes from a spacial source without adding extra channels.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Movie backups.
Now with the "standard" for lossy audio supporting surround, supposedly in a way that still allows stereo to be played from an older device, I can encode my DVD backups with this and have a closer-to-DVD experience when watching movies on my Xbox based media center (that is, once XBMP/XBMC supports playing this...)
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
...but we still are using Microsoft AVI for all our video.
(and it sucks)
btw Quicktime is a container format - saying something is Quicktime tells you nothing about quality or compression. Could be Cinepac, could be Sorenson Pro (which is probably what you meant). Could even be 3ivx.
All the hella-cool iRiver manufactured stuff from the last year or so now has Ogg Vorbis support, as does Rio Karma (and some other Rio thingie), and the Archos, and the Audio Keg, and some other things I can't remember right now.
What I really mean is that all the cool new portables are completely firmware upgradable, which means you'll see the support for formats and technologies as they become applicable (Ogg included). Even if it's not right away. If you bought a product with an all-in-one MP3 decoding chip onboard, well, tough luck.
Now everything is ARM or Dragonball based with real-time OSs.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I don't have a 5.1 receiver, but its an old Mitsubishi that does do regular 4channel Dolby Surround, and all my MP3s ripped w/ iTunes keep the surround channel intact. This is most easily noticeable when listneing to Tool (especially Forty-Six and Two, the drums sway back and forth and right and left - very cool!)
Haven't tried playing them thru a 5.1 receiver, maybe that's what's new.
People have been studying spatial acoustics for a long time now and if I read that article right thats all Fraunhofer is doing. I mean as was already stated you can get a surround effect from a pair of headphones (which EAX tried to do already). It just looks to me like they are doing somthing that has already been done and branding it. btw here is an example of spatial acoustics it only works with headphones.
I'd be very surprised if all the Blu-Ray players *weren't* backward compatible with regular DVD. The laserdisc situation was different... laserdisc never achieved the kind of market penetration and popularity that DVD has right now, so "combo" players were, at best, a novelty.
DVD, on the other hand, is huge right now and will stay that way for at least the next couple of years. Nobody making new BluRay players will be able to ignore that, especially considering that DVD and Blu-Ray discs look the same. The public will expect that the new players be able to play the old stuff, in the same way that everyone expects DVD players to be able to play CD's. And by the point these things are actually for sale, it'll be so cheap to include DVD components in the new players anyway that practically everyone will... again, just like it costs practically nothing to make DVD players play CD's right now. (This will be epecially true considering how much the new players will cost while being introduced; remember when DVD players came out initially? $500 for a player was cheap!)
You're right about the TV situation though. People might buy the new Blu-Ray players, but there's no way people are going to upgrade their video libraries until they have an HDTV and can appreciate the benefits of having hi-def content. (For some people, perhaps not even then... although you can definitely see artifacting, etc. on good HDTV's when viewing regular DVD, that might be enough for some people). And until a lot of people have HDTV, the hi-def Blu-Ray content won't be widely available anyway.
Hi... I'm Larry... the shivering chipmunk... brrrrr!... I'm cold... I need a sweater...
Do you know about Tchad and Mitch's early dark days? The vintage porn film "Nightdreams" isn't vintage just for its wonderfully bizarre imagery - if you know of these fellows then you NEED this DVD. This is the movie that introduced me to Wall of Voodoo (yes, "Ring of Fire" is one of the featured tracks - and accompanies a legendary campfire scene... oooh, aaaah...).
Yet more trivia: Nightdreams was directed by Francois Delia, who also directed the Wall of Voodoo video "Mexican Radio" and assisted photography on the Andy Kaufman biopic "Man on the Moon."
It's Fraunhofer...note the n, the main article spelled frauhofer.
Granted the article is pretty vague with arm-waving non-technical statements like "huge amounts of data".
.
The extra information for the surround sound (which is just multiple channels stored in the same file with various cross-channels redundancies removed) needs to be stored somewhere so that it can be recreated by the player. And this will be with the Z 'ancillary bits' I talked about.
I don't quite understand your point about "multichannel" not being "surround". ISO13818-3 describe "audio with 3 front channels and 2 rear channels plus a Low Frequency (subwoofer) channel"
I realise there are layers of jargon when talking surround/Dolby Surround/DTS/etc/etc; however the article seems to be using the term 'surround' in the generic(lots of channels) sense, not the Dolby(tm) sense (these definitions are pretty close anyway, unless you want to get into the way the channels are matrixed).
Cool, but useless.
Why not just use AC3 or OGG, which both have multichannel support?
... is to add yet another useless feature to an outdated CODEC to ensure it retains its market share. There are a lot of people that encode movies with Xvid/Divx/etc, and would like to get a lower bitrate surround sound format than the original AC3 into their files. Many of them don't even know what OGG or AAC are. They just select MP3 because they know that encodes audio.
Ogg, and other formats already support this, and are gaining market share. Lots of video encding software for Unix, Apple, and EvilOS(TM) support Ogg out of the box. There was a point when Redhat (and I presume others) stopped shipping MP3 support in their distros because of the shitty licensing structure. They never stopped shipping Ogg support (encoders, players, xmms plugins, etc).
It's like car manufacturers putting 8 channel sound systems into their new cars. Somebody will buy it over the competitors car simply because it has 8 speakers in it. No real benefit in the grand scheme of things, but a useless feature.
If you add another useless feature people will want to get hold of it, even though most of them will never understand how the new feature benefits them, nor use it.
People will use it because it's MP3. The glorious masses don't know the difference between OGG, AAC and MP3. They just double-click the filename and *amp (or possibly Media Player) opens and plays the file. They know not, and care not about what format the file is.
I want to rant about this, but I haven't the energy. MP3 is crap. I stopped using it along time ago, when I found out that 128kbps Ogg generally sounded better than 128k MP3 on my hard disk "jukebox" (I rip all my new CDs into the jukebox partition and play them back using Linux/XMMS through my soundsystem. I'm going to upgrade to something with a remote control interface and a pretty GUI that will work on the TV pretty soon).
If only everyone would do the same as me and use Ogg. It's not going to happen, and competition fuels innovation, but when companies blatantly copy what the OS community is doing its not good.
*going to get drunk and forget and `find / -name \*.[mM][pP]3 -exec rm -f \{\} \;
I drink to make other people interesting!