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Microsoft Edge To Support Dolby Audio
jones_supa writes: Microsoft has revealed that its new Edge web browser will come with support for Dolby Audio in order to offer high-class audio when visiting websites. "It allows websites to match the compelling visuals of H.264 video with equally compelling multi-channel audio. It works well with AVC/H.264 video and also with our previously announced HLS and MPEG DASH Type 1 streaming features, which both support integrated playback of an HLS or DASH manifest," Microsoft explains in a blog post. Windows 10 will also ship with a Dolby Digital Plus codec.
That's OK, it will probably only be used for browser hijacking ads anyway.
Don't worry - it runs in kernel space for performance.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
How much you want to bet they just embedded the old media player?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Everything about the web is like that. We are in the process of doing "on the web" everything we have already been doing locally for decades,
This is potentially good for Netflix since Windows users have been limited to stereo from Netflix for some time now since Netflix uses Silverlight.
Microsoft will no doubt partner with Monster Cable to come up with a new IP Layer for transporting web pages with perfect fidelity, much the way that Monster Cable CAT-5 provides perfect Ethernet.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Not too long after Windows 8 launched with the AC-3 and E-AC-3 codecs, Internet Explorer has had the capability to decode these audio formats. It recognizes the FourCC codes in the ISO Base Media File Format container as well as the MIME tags.
Part of the problem, however, is the perceived shift in both audio loudness and the perceived location of speech. All AC-3 and E-AC-3 content, when properly measured, should play dialog back at -31dB relative to full digital scale. Unfortunately, this makes the codec inherently quieter unless the decoder is set to something called RF mode, which boosts the loudness to -20dB and compresses the audio more heavily. Such control for loudness is not typically found in HTML5-based apps, though the W3C has a committee working on this issue. The loudness can be a particular problem on the Windows 8 tablet devices out there, as many programs in AAC format come pre-normalized to somewhere around -23dB to -24dB relative to full scale. Unless all content is pre-normalized to the same consistent playback level - which AAC ads will definitely not be, and probably not AAC stereo content - there will be an inconsistency of experience.
All of this also presupposes that you have either a proper surround virtualizer or a discrete 5.1 speaker system such as is found in a properly set up home theater. Considering that less than a third of homes have any kind of surround sound in them, and given the loudness issues, I'm not certain what the benefits will be here. But it gets even worse, as dialog in multichannel AC-3 and E-AC-3 is steered to the center channel in most programs, whereas in stereo content it is mixed into left and right without regard to position. This can result in disturbance to the listener. Furthermore, any channel configuration changes to an audio-video receiver will typically cause muting when switching modes between stereo output and multichannel output, potentially interrupting the experience for the listener.
Part of this is the add-on nature of AC-3 and E-AC-3 to Windows and an inherent failure to integrate stereo AAC and HE AAC playback behavior with that of stereo and multichannel AC-3 and E-AC-3. Until then, this will be more of a curiosity than anything substantially improving the consumer's experience, and developers should take note if they believe that HTML5/CSS/Javascript development of their apps can really unify their experience across devices yet.
Hey, I have been married for more than 20 years and have two children and I'm on slashdot.... He/She can have a girlfriend...
No, no, /.ers can totally be "married for several years", or have no girlfriend at all - either way you're not getting laid. It's that in-between zone that we don't see here. (There's an old joke: put a pebble in a jar every time you have sex until your first anniversary. Remove a pebble from the jar every time you have sex after that. The jar will never be empty.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
LOL, more like it's audio for people who care about the quality of audio. I use the DTS HD-MA or TrueHD track with my receiver in pure direct mode so that I don't get all sorts of crap filtering and can just listen to the audio as it was intended to be presented (and how you'd hear it if you saw the movie in a theater, though generally with fewer tracks)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
No, only supporting codecs that have a known IP licensing path. That's worth paying some money, especially compared to the alternative of relying on the vague and either naïve or cynical IP promises (promises they've shown willingness to walk away from when pressed) from a company which makes no bones about wanting to destroy them.
Ogg is not in grey IP limbo, especially not Vorbis. I'll agree with you on Google's WebM, but only because it's comedy gold how they got everyone else to agree to use it, then decided to keep h263 support, effectively rendering WebM completely pointless, presumably because it would cost more to transcode all of YouTube than it would to just let all that effort on WebM be rendered completely pointless. And yet they still think people will adopt WebP like being burned once wasn't enough.
Dolby does a lot of good research. That you throw them aside as a relic of the past, while at the same time discrediting them for some of the formats you praise (AAC is a thing in part due in part to Dolby's participation in creating the standard) simply shows that you have a myopic and illogical view of the world.
Kid-proof tablet..
Thank Dolby Labs for no-hiss DACs, noise-cancelling headphone cans, ADC floor filters, echo and feedback cancellation, cellular handsfree...
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel