On Mon, Oct 15, 2001 at 11:36:49PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote: > whats the legal status of surround encoding? are we free to write > GPL'ed software that encodes 6 streams of audio data into DTS or Dolby > digital?
Nope, the dolby ones at least are very much not free. c.f. www.dolby.com I've written a 4 channel matrix encoder for LADSPA that just happens to be compatible with prologic (aka dolby surround) as I believe that the generic form of this variety of matrix encoding is not Dolby IP, but Dobly's digital formats most definatly are (plus I don't you can encode to them in realtime on a PC anyway). DTS OTOH is patented, but I've a feeling the the line format is just the 2 stereo channels plus Sr, Sl and LFE, uncompressed on the data channels, so its hard to imagine that thats covered by the patents. - Steve
