Stefan Schreiber wrote:
I would say that's debatable, in that bluray players should
accept Dolby/DCA and both are specified so that decoders skip
substreams/extensions that they don't know about.
Additionally if instructed, the player can just pass on
bitstreams without decoding to a receiver without caring what it
contains.
Of course there may not currently exist and decoders that could
use wxyz, but from a compatibility point of view I don't thing it
would be impossible for current disks/players to handle a stream
with wxyz embedded - they wouldn't know or care. Even a normal
decoder wouldn't care and could just do what it knows about.
This would be G format?
No b-format wxyz is the example given of an "audio asset" that may be
flagged as not directly being for speakers.
But I believe we already should aim for something far more complete.
Fair enough - I am in no way arguing in favor of DTS - I just mentioned
something I was surprised to see when looking at the spec for unrelated
reasons.
I am all in favour to find < some > more or less < agreed > solution,
but what you describe would be still a standard extension.
But if we are at this: I will post some proposal how to define some
Ambisonics based real-world standard (CE standard) during the next
days. (This one will use more or less existing components.) In fact
there have been some private discussions, and I believe there have
been some results which might prove useful.
Of course a bespoke and open/free standard is going to be better
Using (currently) BD doesn't help quite a lot. You can use the
channels for B format/HOA channels (WXYZ etc.), but you can't feed
this into a normal decoder. (You would also need some flags to
bypass. I fear even this is not very well defined in HDMI etc. For
example, you can transmit/"bypass" TrueHD/DTS HD MA in a bitstream to
a receiver, but not "WXYZ". At least not yet. The mixing stage you
have described is actually in the BD player, but then the receiver
will expect a HDMI PCM stream? Most probably...)
The DTS spec is referring to DTS-HD - so the player AIUI could just pass
the whole stream to a decoder which if "ambisonic aware" could get the
wxyz from the stream and if not ignore it.
Personally, I also believe that some disc based solution < should >
exist, but this is more the 2nd step. IMHO, you would define the
Ambisonics "CE" standard, and then the distribution via file formats,
"on-disc" etc. (You would also define typical output configurations,
like 5.1/6.1/7.1, hexagon, octagon, binaural.)
If you don't do this, you are getting stuck with FOA. More important
(if you don't care), some backward-compatible "hack extension" won't
permit to progress to higher orders in the future, say SOA/TOA.
Maybe, but DTS-HD and DTD_MA are by your definition "hack extensions"
themselves - again I don't in any way favor DTS over something better
and certainly don't even understand the spec well enough from just
skimming it to be sure of anything, but the there is mention of up to 32
channels in there somewhere.
FWIW it is freely available - just google ETSI TS 102 114 V1.4.1 pdf
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