Video Asylum

Sony, Fox, and Disney have no issues putting lossless audio on their disks.

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This Post Has Been Edited by the Author

In Reply to: RE: Oh, I agree that there is constraint relative to Blu-ray posted by racerguy on October 20, 2007 at 09:13:24

If anything uncompressed PCM saves them the royalty costs of TrueHD and DTS HD MA. And it certainly helps that 8 Mbps available for audio is a "freebie" which has no impact on the available video bitrate for Blu-ray disks (up to 40 mbps). In contrast, HD DVD has to live within 30 mbps which has to be allocated between audio and video. And the lower the allocated video bitrate, the more likely the studio has to put more TLC into the encoding; so guess what ? the studios will opt for a lossy audio track to save on the costs of encodes and maintain video bitrates to minimize compression artifacts. I point to the pitiful percentage of HD DVDs with lossless audio (<15%) as evidence.

The compressionists job becomes much easier when afforded the greate bandwidth/storage available to Blu-ray. I think the studios will eventually figure out this will save them money in the long run.

The sample size is still too small but I expect 24 bit lossless audio for music videos will be more prevalent for Blu-ray than for HD DVD. I also expect only Blu-ray will be able to support 5.1 24/96 for music videos with any kind of decent high def video (re: bandwidth/storage).

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