Thomson Releases MP3 Surround

Anonymous Howard writes "Thomson has released MP3 Surround, a new MP3 codec. They claim that MP3 Surround supports high-quality multi-channel sound at bit rates comparable to those currently used to encode stereo MP3 material, resulting in files half the size of common compressed surround formats while maintaining backwards compatibility. Wasn't MP3 Pro supposed to be a great new MP3 codec, but never took off? I wonder if this is going to go the same route. Does anyone have a technical view of MP3 Surround? Does it have potential?"

Comments

MP3 is dead, right?

[YetAnotherName]

I'm sure I read that on Slashdot before. AAC and OggVorbis have pummeled it into oblivion. Netcraft must've confirmed it, right?

Are my Slashdot stories flowing into each other again?

Re:MP3 is dead, right?

[bryan986]

Dont advertise links for your referals, slashdot is not the place for that

No

[pcmanjon]

Well, with so much of the internets illegal mp3's already encoded I don't think it will take off.

I mean, theres terabytes out there in mp3 format, and it'd be too much hassle for everyone who has encoded their personal collection to this new mp3 format.

It could take off, but unlikley. If it does, there will be a mix of the two formats, traditional mp3, and this new type.

Re:No

[Zeal17]

It won't replace current mp3s. It will only be a method of compressing 5.1 channel surround sound files. It will only be useful for ripping DVD audio, or attaching it to DVD movies that have been compressed with divx or something.

Re:No

[MrResistor]

My guess is that the question is largely irrelevant, at least from Thomson's point of view. The technology is very useful to Thomson, and it's really just gravy if someone else wants to license it from them (granted, it could be a lot of gravy, but that isn't why they developed it).

You see, Thomson sells stuff under 4 brand names: consumer electronics are sold under Thomson (mainly in Europe) and RCA, and content production products under Technicolor and Grass Valley (a big name in TV production equipment). One of the areas they're particularly strong is Digital Video Servers, most of which are MPEG based. One of the big limitations on what you can do with those servers, especially when you're dealing with HD, is the bandwidth of the storage media. Anything that reduces the amount of bandwidth any given feature requires is good stuff. So this is a very useful technology for Thomson, and of course it will be a must have for anyone wanting to communicate with Thomson/Grass Valley video servers (which would be anyone in professional video production).

It may or may not take off in the consumer market, but rest assured it will do just fine in the pro market.

It could be used in games.

[Knetzar]

To me this codec seems more useful for programmers of games and multimedia applications then for home users.

Re:It could be used in games.

[batkiwi]

Usually a game sound is mono, and the sound engine renders it's position using some 3d sound API. Except for a cutscene, you'd never use a surround encoded sound.

While you could "cheat" using this and have, say, 16 mp3s of a gunshot from 16 radials around the listener, I still don't see it as being that helpful.

Screw Potential!

[way2trivial]

I wanna know- does it have DRM?

Re:Screw Potential!

[That's Unpossible!]

I wanna know- does it have DRM?

That doesn't really matter. AAC doesn't "have" DRM either, but that doesn't stop Apple from using DRM with AAC (aka FairPlay).

It really depends on the company distributing the MP3.

The more relevant question is does it have licensing fees and patents encumbering it? I'm sure it does. Though that never really stopped MP3.

OGG

[mmegremis]

What ever happend to .ogg? I though that was spose to take over..

Once again....

[detritus`]

Once again, MP3 does what most people want it to do, and as such all the MP3 devices out there are good enough for the general public. Plus if its not backwards compatible it wont be adopted. Just accept it already. Even though i love .ogg, i dont think its ever going to take over the market in the near future, heck even sony's dropping its non-support of MP3, not just using aatrac or whatever anymore

Re:Once again....

[evilviper]

Plus if its not backwards compatible it wont be adopted. Just accept it already.

What evidence do you have of this? MPEG-4 sure isn't backwards compatible. AAC/WMA isn't backwards compatible, yet all of them are catching on.

i dont think its ever going to take over the market in the near future

Splitting infinitives is a crime punishably by a $500 fine, up to 3 days in jail, or both.

MPEG4 (DiVX, Xvid) with surround sound?

[Linuxathome]

So does that mean I can re-encode my dvds to DiVX with surround sound? Or does that already do it now and I don't know it? Please don't mod me down, it's an earnest question.

Re:MPEG4 (DiVX, Xvid) with surround sound?

[Jherek Carnelian]

Typically the video is re-encoded and stereo audio gets turned into mp3 or ogg.

If the audio track is multichannel, it is usually just preserved in the original encoding. AC3 (Dolby Digital) is usually either 384Kbps or 448Kbps on the DVD and DTS is usually 768Kbps with the rare 1.5Mbps track.

Ogg vorbis does have provision for multichannel sound, up to (I think) 255 channels. I have not looked for over a year, but none of the encoders or decoders supported more than 2-channel ogg back then.

in canada

[Anonymous Coward]

mp3's surround you!

Hmmm

[blackmonday]

I'm not so sure surround sound *needs* MP3 compression. DVD Shrink shows movies' 5.1 DTS soundtracks using around 200 - 300MB. That's for a 1 1/2 to 2 hour movie. Not bad for 5 speaker surround, with subwoofer. Not shabby!

Re:Hmmm

[MukiMuki]

Yeah, but DTS sounds like crap at that size compared to what mp3 would. DTS isn't designed to go 750kbits, it's kind of a hack they added later. Which is unfortunate, because now people can end up with bad DTS tracks. (to be quite honest, 640kbits AC3 sounds a lot better than 750kbits DTS. DTS just sounds nicer 'cause it's usually twice that.)

MP3 surround will be very similar to AC3, only with less restrictive Dolby Digital crap. (give Thomson/Frauhenhour all the crap you want, but they've been pretty nice about licensing compared to DD/DTS/anyone save for OGG.)

What this is DEFINITELY going to lead to, however, is the cracking of CSS-2 for DVD-a's. Finally, surround sound in a GOOD format~! ^_^

Surround

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possible that most people simply don't have surround sound on their at their computers, or just listen to MP3s using MP3-players thus rendering this codec obsolete for most?

Oh Joy.

[ackthpt]

I haven't even ripped the shrinkwrap of my new sound card (top o' the line as of 5 AM, today) and it's time to look for replacements.

But... what music is in surround? Probably that long hair stuff conducted by some symphony orchestra. Certainly not The Beatles ... unless yetanother version of remastered classics come out.

Screw it. I'll just go downtown and listen to some live music.

Realistically... the average Joe doesn't care

[PornMaster]

"Regular people" won't pay anything extra for this... they'll only use it if it's done automatically for them. Perhaps it'll get thrown in with BluRay/HD-DVD on players, and then maybe it'll get phased in, but during that kind of a format change, you're not going to get Bob McCracken going to best buy looking for a progressive scan DVD player and looking for "MP3 Surround" on the spec sheet.

CDs are stereo, this won't catch on for awhile

[j1m 5n0w]

Since most audio files are ripped from stereo CDs, I suppose surround-sound MP3s aren't really all that useful for most people.

I do have one quatrophonic record lying around somewhere, but since I don't have a record player, or a sound card with a four channel input, it's kind of hard to rip it to a surround sound audio format.

Hopefully, whatever technology people are using for >2 channel audio eventually trickles down to the masses. Maybe itunes or whoever will start selling surround audio files, if they don't already.

Would this have impact on home theater systems?

[cbw82]

I wouldn't think that an MP3 surround format would really impact home theater systems too much. When you get into such high quality systems, lower bit rates on sounds would become very noticeable and therefore less attractive to the sound buff.

Well, I guess the DiVx community will rejoice.

MP3 should be left alone

[ChiralSoftware]

Why are they bothering with this? All the other standards that came after MP3 (AAC/Quicktime, Ogg, WMA) learned from MP3 and improved on it significantly. What's the issue with backward compatibility? Every player out there now can already play better formats.

This is like trying to "improve" a car that's 30 years old when instead you could just have a modern car that doesn't need to be improved. Might be a fun hobby, but doesn't make sense as business idea.

Dolby Pro Logic anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've ripped a few music/concert DVD-Videos, downmixed to 2-channel Dolby Pro Logic--same thing you get on a 'surround sound' TV program--then encoded as MP3 and saved it in my collection. It works well enough for me. (A program called HeadAC3he will do it. Google it.) It's not real surround sound, but it sounds pretty decent on a surround sound setup. Also sounds cool on headphones.

I have no need for a special codec whose special features aren't supported by any of my hardware or software.

Re:Screw em

[Billly Gates]

But there are free altenatives like Ogg/vorbis. Why not support them?

Besides Thompson let Linux and others have it for free until it saturated the market then pulled the plug and demanded ownership of standard audio. Pretty sleazy in my book.

mp3PRO - your opinion

[infofarmer]

I think it sounds great. It absolutely can't provide for audiophile quality, but it still does wonders on 64-128Kbit/s bitrates. Admit it, that the one and only thing that buried it - was the stupid patenting/licensing scheme. But from a technical point of view, it left OGG/AAC/WMA a step behind.

Games are going largely OGG Vorbis

[Sycraft-fu]

Because of licensing. You have to pay a decoder license fee for each copy of the game you sell. So many of them are picking up OGG Vorbis instead. Most importantly, the Unreal Engine and now Doom 3 use them. Many games are based on the Unreal Engine and latest iD engine so it's likely to grow quite a bit.

All things being equal, they'll probably use WMA instead if they want surround music since the license is cheaper, and you don't need one on Windows (it already knows how to play them back).

No, really, why not OGG?

[FrYGuY101]

Especially since OGG Vorbis can support 255 independant channels...

mp3pro is for dialup users

[iamacat]

The point is to recover high frequencies stripped of by low bit rate (64kbps) MP3 encoding, based on existing low frequencies and some hints on what is missing. The result is that you can listen to music radio over a 56K line. It's not great, but it will not hurt your ears. Musicmatch radio took a good advantage of this format.

But at higher bit rate high frequences are already encoded and do not have to be recovered. Given that you are not going to encode surround sound at 64kbps, MP3Pro and MP3 surround will never be used together.