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Dolby Looking To Monopolize Consumer Audio By Restricting Its Codec (audioholics.com)
Audiofan writes from a report via Audioholics, written by Gene DellaSala: Variety is said to be the spice of life. Why only eat cherry Starbursts when you can sample orange, watermelon, lemon, etc? The same applies to multi-channel surround sound upmixers. But the folks at Dolby apparently want you to eat only one flavor. Their flavor. Dolby recently issued a mandate to all of their Atmos licensee partners to restrict usage of third-party upmixers with any Dolby signals including 5.1/7.1 DD, DD+, TrueHD and Atmos. That means if you're running a DTS Soundbar, it won't process a Dolby signal, or no dice if you want to use the Auro-Matic Upmixer for a native Dolby signal. Is Dolby doing this to protect their IP or to monopolize consumer audio like they tried to do with their patented Atmos-enabled speaker? The copy of the mandate that was sent to all of Dolby's licensee partners has the following guidelines: Native Dolby Atmos content shall NOT be up-mixed, surround or height virtualized by any 3rd party competitor upmixer (ie. DTS or Auro-3D); Channel-Based DD/DD+, Dolby TrueHD 5.1 and 7.1 codecs shall not be height virtualized by any 3rd party upmixer (ie. DTS). (This implies height virtualization without height speakers. DTS has this capability but Auro-3D does not).
Audioholics notes the company will however "permit third party upmixing and/or surround virtualization of channel-based codecs that support Dolby Atmos rendering as long as the third party doesn't license their own upmixing technologies to third parties."
As for why Dolby is issuing this mandate to its licensees, it may come down to two reasons: control quality of content so that their upmixer is only used with their software; put an end to Auro-3D and strike a blow to DTS.
Audioholics notes the company will however "permit third party upmixing and/or surround virtualization of channel-based codecs that support Dolby Atmos rendering as long as the third party doesn't license their own upmixing technologies to third parties."
As for why Dolby is issuing this mandate to its licensees, it may come down to two reasons: control quality of content so that their upmixer is only used with their software; put an end to Auro-3D and strike a blow to DTS.
Why is this a big deal? Are people really affected by this or us it just on principle?
Surround sound changes faster than most folks swap out their smartphones, only a select few upgrade every year to get the latest. Besides can you stream atmos?
So many company's being utter a-holes.,,,
Scratches anything Dolby related from the list of things ill go near.
I hope you will all do the same.
Yup. I'll be avoiding Dolby products from now on.
I don't need a company taxing my audio with anti competitive tactics.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
It's never about quality. It's always about hindering competition.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
It's insane!y easy to separate audio channels and pipe them to discrete speakers.
That and people are happy enough watching through their phones and tablets with barely any stereo separation.
Who cares?
Good luck with all that BS.
Atmos is a system, not a codec.
Traditionally, you had a pre-mixed channel bed like 5.1 (AC-3, E-AC-3, MLP and AC-4), and 7.1 (supported by E-AC-3, MLP and AC-4). With the introduction of audio objects in 3D space, E-AC-3, MLP and AC-4 are extended - and that is what Atmos basically is.
The problem is how to manage loudness when you have a channel bed and/or objects. E-AC-3, for example, had a substream type originally reserved for future use - in this case, implementing Atmos. Since E-AC-3-based Atmos is backwards compatible with legacy E-AC-3 decoders, Dolby has had to do some tricks to the metadata to insert the objects and keep loudness managed. This can only be accomplished at the renderer, and it requires tight control of the metadata to manage loudness consistently.
When you get into third-party upmixers, they do all sorts of awful things (*cough*Neural*cough*). Two things they can do due to "artistic" interpretation are to improperly locate the audio in 3D space, and mix in the incorrect level the audio that goes into the speakers. Because of differences in perception in loudness depending on location around your head, and because you aren't mixing the right level of audio at/across a given speaker, the original renderer's interpretation of loudness metadata and location metadata is incorrect. This leads to potentially disturbing variations in loudness and confusion in location of content that is the fundamental basis for Dolby providing an entire Atmos system from authoring to rendering, end-to-end.
The only place upmixers typically exist in devices anyway is in AV receivers and soundbars. Yes, they can exist in the broadcast chain somewhere before encoding and transmission, but broadcasters should know to manage that experience any time object-based audio is in play. As for the rest, Dolby already offers its own upmixer that works with the Atmos renderer. There really is no good reason to go outside of this, and licensees of Dolby technologies are only degrading the end user experience by doing this.
Again, Dolby doesn't care per se whether someone else is using another system, be it DTS or Barco or Fraunhofer. All they care about is that the content owners and distributors don't have complaints because of this. Certain folks who provide premium content, such as HBO, are huge sticklers for audio quality and have been pioneers since the beginning. If they're investing in Atmos, they don't want the downstream experience affected and so Dolby is really doing their bidding ultimately.
So no, there's no conspiracy and Dolby isn't doing this to screw anyone else over. "Blame" the content owners if you want to blame anyone, but Dolby is just trying to provide a consistent experience that has eluded folks for decades now. If you want proof of that, go watch 100 different videos from any large free streaming site and tell me that you won't touch the volume control.
You mean other than the government granted monopoly, right?
Except that Thomas Dolby is a musician and has nothing to do with Dolby the sound engineering technology developed by Ray Dolby but yeah, you got this nailed.
I will. Also i'll not sell it in my stores and recommened everyone boycott dolby licenced companies.
Cool story. I'm sure if people can't get Atmos home theater systems for their nice new 4K setups from you, they'll gladly go to the big box store next door. Have fun being relegated to oblivion douchebag.
This sounds like bad news. All....Around.
they can only muscle their atmos licensees... but their best patents are all expired
Is there even any 5.1 music available??
When they're done blinding you with science, they want to make sure you know which direction it came from.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Most companies can't even get basic upmixing right.
For example: Jaguar/Land Rover with their shitty Meridian audio systems can't even upmix Siri's 1-channel audio to 2-channel stereo - they play it through the ".1" sub woofer channel where it sounds completely unrecognizable.
Wait.
There's more than one Dolby?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
He's a douchebag for not selling a product from a company whose behavior he disagrees with? Really??
Come on now. Grow up.
He's a douchebag for thinking his actions are going to make any difference to the company who is trying to protect the experience that customers have by using their products.
If he doesn't agree with it, and chooses to not sell Dolby products in his store, his customers will end up just going to Best Buy to get their equipment.
It's cool, Dolby doesn't need him.
Dammit Dolby, I should be free to virtualize and upmix Dolby tracks however I want. Iâ(TM)m a big believer in virtualized 3D sound with a mimimum of drivers and speakers ever since Aureal A3D 3D sound blew my mind back in the day (15 or more years ago) with just two speakers. Ainâ(TM)t nobody got type to to buy all those speakers and move em around all crazy like. Dolby, just let me take my 5.1 setup and expand my experience with DSP, jeez.
How that that make him a "douche"? Omg he doesn't sell a product line! He's an asshole! Nm most stores don't stock what people always want! They are owned by douches too!
Dolby-A was the savior of studio recording decades ago. They were making too much money, so along came dbx. Fraunhofer likely has enough money left from its MP3 licenses to do something better really soon. Technology moves fast, but so does the competition.
I literally was getting sleepy in that first paragraph listing all the dolby standards. He's like "Traditionally, you had a pre-mixed channel bed like 5.1 (A bladiblahJadajada audionuttechnobabble jaadajada" And me: "Aha, mmhmm ...*nod off* ... ZzzzZZzzzz *snor*"
It went so fast that I did notice it. :-)
Dude, I swear, *nobody* finished reading your comment. Don't take it to heart though. Why don't you tell us about your neat Burmester Amps? :-))
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
my tv is a vintage color crt from the mid 70s with a ~ 3 inch mono speaker... so i dont care about dolby shit.
At least he's not MY President.
Because I'm European.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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I listen to music on my laptops built in sound system. What is it? Some generic off-the-chip bullshit. Whatever. It sounds fine. I have some nice headphones. $100 something or others. All sounds good to me.
So really. I don't care. I suspect most people don't care. Dolby is now the crazy guy ranting on the corner.
> but Dolby is just trying to provide a consistent experience that has eluded folks for decades now.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..
No, Dolby is the little "D" on ths goodcasette taps.
The musician you're thinking of is Alton Brown.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
People with ear buds or beats headphones seem typical these days. This ain't hurting them.
Those people are indeed most likely to listen to music from their smartphone.
Appart from the oddballs (Apple own patents on AAC and thus pretty much does whatever they want with it),
nearly all the smartphone/app/internet/webapp ecosystem has been taken over by OPUS an openstandars and open source high qality codec (beats nearly everything else, the only exception being the extreme low bandwidth which doesn't fit the internet use-cases).
Close to all modern apps (be it for voice calls or for music) have shifthed to this (with the high visible exception of Spotify, they started with Vorbis, OPUS' predecessor open source web standart).
Because most of the internet and app devs got fed up with the licensing shenanigans formerly around MP3 and then around AAC.
So most of these people won't give a damn about Dolby, and multi channel speaker upmixing (they only have 2 channels to begin with anyway). That technology got excised out of the mobile scene.
The problem is the home theater, home cinema, TV, etc.
These are the people having multi-speaker setup, and the TV world seems much more entrenched into older standard (e.g.: MPEG's video and audio codecs, Dolby's and DTS' codecs for sound, etc.)
These are the people affected by the licensing shenanigans of Dolby.
Of course Dolby *has* an excuse : they don't want their logo stuck on a piece of shitty hardware that does catastrophic multi-channel sound generation, and then only use Dolby to stream the badly distorted noise to the speaker system : that will ruin Dolby's reputation due to factors that have nothing to do with their technology.
The problem is that in practice, Dolby will most likely abuse the duopoly they have (together with DTS) in the movie audio market to mostly try to make sure to get some money out of every bit of sound played together with any movie.
But Dolby should be paying attention to what happened with OPUS on the internet/smartphone market.
If they start pissing way to many people with their licensing practice, they might be next.
Netflix, Youtube, Amazon, etc. : nowadays the various streaming platforms represent together a bigger market share than the classical TV channels and satellite cable networks together.
They come from a more internet oriented background. They got fed up with MPEG's licensing bullshit, and they banded together with all the other members behind AOMedia, and sent a giant collective "fuck you" to MPEG in the form of AV-1 codec.
Nowadays, there's no technical reason why Dolby should be important in the TV market.
There used to be a technical restriction in the past making it mandatory to use DTS or Dolby to transmit the audio to the speaker system : there's only so much data that you can cram within the fixed ~1.0-1.5Mbps bandwidth of SPDIF and TOSLink. You need to compress it to transmit it, and Dolby and DTS managed to get into the home theater market due to their presence in the commercial movie theaters. This made possible to have Video Laser Discs (on their digital track), then DVDs and now current media and streams that contain a standard format that can be streamed straight to the audio receiver.
But nowadays with standards like HDMI, that can pipe multiple uncompressed streams to the audio receiver, the Dolby or DTS compressions make a lot less sense.
A movie streaming app running on the smartTV/HDMI stick/set top box could fetch audio in any format it want (including the above mentioned OPUS), decompress it, optionally up-mixes it if the user has more speakers in their home cinema than what is streamed, and send it as raw uncompressed audio the speaker system, without Dolby ever being involved at any sstep.
Dolby should watch out to not piss off the market because some player (mostly the modern movie streaming platform) could pretty well do exactly that.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
protect the experience that customers have.
How American can you get? They are just trying to cockblock the competition.
A set of high-quality stereo speakers and a sub or two to fill out the frequency range at the bottom end and done.
I don't need wizz-bang bullshit going on behind me or above me or whatever. If the move isn't immersive enough without surround sound, it's not a good movie, and hence not worth watching.
Eat the rich.
Companies are always trying to grab market share. But even if Dolby were to succeed at this as much as they like, they'd simply temporarily dominate the market, not monopolize it. You can bet that soon thereafter, if the feature mattered, some big company or an industry consortium would come out with some better, open source alternative.
sorry dolby, nobody cares... its not 1987 anymore.
Advanced Audio Coding
FairPlay was done so the record labels would let Apple sell music, maybe you're thinking about that?
Apple didn't really want to use it, see Thoughts on Music, and was eventually able to convince the labels to drop the DRM requirement.
I have done so log ago. This is artificial scarcity, nothing else.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
At least in the US/North American markets Dolby is mandated (i.e. has a monopoly) as the broadcast standard for ATSC audio. While cable companies could do something different re-encoding feeds/content, that is a step they would want to avoid. Cell phones is are a bit different, there you only need the Dolby decoder because some of the content stands a reasonable chance of having the audio in a Dolby format. But the manufacturers are sort of forced to include it because customers expect to be able to watch anything they want. Many streaming systems also use Dolby encoding for some of their content.
This is independent of what your playback system is, i.e. 5.1 or simple earbuds - you still need to decode the audio. By blocking post processing options from other suppliers Dolby is locking everyone in to "their way" only. I am not knocking Dolby's work, they have some very smart audio people and do significant R&D. It's the heavy handed attempt to monetize that work that is the problem. When used for something like ATSC (use of a publicly owned commons - airwaves) companies that have their technology selected are supposed to license it under "Fair and reasonable terms". Blocking new and innovative methods of post decode sound field processing is neither fair nor reasonable. The companies that work in this area are typically small and can't afford the lawyers to take on a giant like Dolby, so they will (and have) given up.
Are those third party efforts better than Dolby's? Perhaps sometimes yes, sometimes no. The concern with this new position from Dolby is that you and I will never get the chance to know if someone has a better product.
Dolby is also a patent machine and ties up their technology for long periods of time by playing the system. It's a pretty clear case that at least for technology standards that use a public resource (airwaves) should use "open source/non-patented" technology to avoid exactly they type of issue being created by Dolby in telling audio system designers what they can and can not do, and limiting the options for customers.
In some other parts of the world Fruanhofer's MPEG-H is being used for broadcast of audio (for TV), I do not know what restrictions they might place on customers as it's fairly new.
This is why I'm leaving slashdot...
Pointless political commentary in every thread.
Take an already poor and inconsistent audio experience... for literally any consumer paying the slightest attention, and make it even more poor and inconsistent!
See? Insufferable neckbeardery.
This is way more libertarian than its comic imagery suggests.
To begin with, it implies millimeter large-muscle control, situated in the cerebral cortex, over an ape-link domination reflex arc which traditionally originates in the Brown Shirt–craving amygdala.
It also implies passive boundary management on the behalf of the indolent beak. Perhaps an alternate version would read: Your right to shove your shit down my throat ends when I close my mouth, purse my lips, and bar my teeth.
The difference explains why so many people show up with a shit sandwich to find out whether you've got the wits (or not) to suppress your aggressive ape arm-swing swallow reflex.
Standard libertarian error: I did nothing, because I presumed the asshole was aiming at my nose, instead. In libertarian theory—if you believe this aphorism—that's quite all right, no need for alarm. Just so long as the fist stops, on a dime, in cross-eyed, neutral air space.
These weirder-than-normal typos happen when I've got mental shoes pointed at the exit (you know that old "toe direction" magic decoder ring to home in on damp sex-kitten hotness).
This, in keeping with my theme, that maintenance of full autonomy does ultimately become wearing.
Eventually, another part of my brain orients me toward another task, entirely unlike girding my alimentary intake against the daily shit-sandwich shit storm.
Generally, when I'm not writing, I think the world is a grand place (mostly). This partly because I do exercise my immune function so vigorously, in my ritualistic (and personally important) daily yelling into the wind—without which I would soon lapse into mouth-breathing, like so many others, who've pragmatically adapted themselves to inhaling the taint tax.
Just tell them it's part of an alien invasion conspiracy.
I felt a lot better about it after reading your childish drivel.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.