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Microsoft Xbox One and Windows 10 Getting Dolby Atmos Surround Sound (betanews.com)
BrianFagioli quotes a report from BetaNews: When people think of the technology behind video games and movies, they often just focus on the visuals. True, when creating an immersive experience, the video is probably the most important aspect from a technological perspective. With that said, audio quality is very important too. Today, Microsoft announces that both Xbox One And Windows 10 will be getting Dolby Atmos support in future updates. If you aren't familiar, it is a surround sound technology with a focus on immersion. Don't have compatible audio hardware? Don't worry -- the Windows-maker is promising a "virtual" Atmos experience too. Larry Hryb, Xbox Live's Major Nelson said in a statement, "Xbox will be the first game console to feature Dolby Atmos and game developers are excited about using the new capabilities to make their games richer and more engaging. Atmos support for the Blu-ray app on Xbox is already available in Preview and will be released to GA soon -- and we're very excited now to offer Atmos support to games on Xbox One and Windows 10."
Is this just some advertising for Dolby? They're a nightmare to deal with from a licensing and certification perspective. Give your money and time to DTS and Fraunhofer and stop supporting this monster.
While on one hand this is a bit of advertising, on the other hand it is kind of cool technology.
Isn't the point of Atmos not to add more physical channels, but rather to add logical channels? Each logical channel contains positioning information and it is up to the specific implementation to map the logical channel to whatever physical channels are available. For example a logical channel might be a helicopter flying overhead from behind the listener's right to in front of the listener's left. If played on a a simple two speaker system the sound would move from right to left, on a 5.1 or 7.1 system you would get the surround effect, on a more exotic system with speakers on the ceiling you would get more precise directional sound. Concept being to encode what sounds should appear to be where in 3D space and let the system create the best sound it can with the speakers it has.
In theory, it seems like a good idea. Do we need it for home use, probably not. I am still pretty happy with my 5.1 system. That being said the concept of having the sound data describe not only what but where the sound should come from logically is kind of cool as it tends to future proof for new speaker systems.
Directsound was killed off in windows vista. Openal was supposed to replace it but that's pretty much a dead stick too, though some engines still support it. The current standard in windows, xbox, and phone is xaudio2 which does support multichannel with a low latency software mixer. However, there is no hardware acceleration for it. Some titles do their own mixing and dsp in-game with libraries like FMOD and just push the output to xaudio. Titles typically expose multiple speaker modes so adding multichannel isn't that big of a deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.fmod.org/
You thought you haven't had enough Windows Updates? Fear no more. Introducing Windows 10 to the Dolby Atmos family.
Instead of sitting around in your living room doing Absolutely Nothing for 2 hrs waiting for Windows Update to finish, NOW you will get the privilege to sit around a 60 feet wide movie theater screen doing Absolutely Nothing for 2 hrs waiting for Windows Update to finish.
Coming Soon in every Dolby Atmos movie theaters everywhere!
You still have only two ears remember?!
You only have 2 eyes, so I suppose anything more than a line is overkill?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Nothing good can come from naming a product "ATMOS".
Do you want Sontarans? Because that's how you get Sontarans.
Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of.
Microsoft eliminated hardware-level mixing for audio in Vista (even for DirectSound), and in hindsight, it was a very good decision. The problem with hardware mixing is that it kills off a lot of mixing flexibility, and it only was necessary when CPUs were so slow that they would have struggled to mix a few dozen sounds simultaneously. Not only that, it changes the mix between hardware devices and software fallbacks, making it harder to balance things properly.
These days, not only can a CPU handle the mixing overhead, but it can even simultaneously decode compressed the source audio as well, all without even straining much at all. Beyond that, you have more flexibility in how various effects are applied, grouped / submixed, and so on.
I guess I'd be their target market, as I'm both a professional game dev as well as something of an audio systems specialist in past years, but I'd have to know a lot more about the technical details before I'd know if I were interested in this tech or not. At the very least, I'd need to make sure it didn't screw with our carefully tuned audio mix too much. But if helps to provide a consistent audio experience between different speakers and configurations, sure, I could see how that would be useful.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.