Microsoft Selects Dolby Audio for Windows 10

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Windows Media Player is dead, long live Dolby Audio. The new Windows 10 may not have carried over Media Center and that may be a bad thing for some, but for others, it gives the opportunity to experience the sound of Dolby Audio through Microsoft Edge.

Dolby Audio (supporting Dolby Digital Plus) will be available in x86 Windows 10 PCs and tablets for playback of movies, TV shows, and videos with crisp, clear dialogue and greater detail of sounds.
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Does anyone else think it's funny that Microsoft is resurrecting the audio standard from their failed HD-DVD format as the new standard for their browser? I was mildly disappointed they chose to go with a lossy format, but I'm guessing the bitrates are more in line with what content providers want, anyway.
 
CrazyRob said:
Does anyone else think it's funny that Microsoft is resurrecting the audio standard from their failed HD-DVD format as the new standard for their browser? I was mildly disappointed they chose to go with a lossy format, but I'm guessing the bitrates are more in line with what content providers want, anyway.
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Failure?
dolby digital plus is just An upgrade of the original dolby digital (ac-3) and its the most popular multichannel digital audio format.
 
CrazyRob said:
Does anyone else think it's funny that Microsoft is resurrecting the audio standard from their failed HD-DVD format as the new standard for their browser? I was mildly disappointed they chose to go with a lossy format, but I'm guessing the bitrates are more in line with what content providers want, anyway.
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No? Dolby Digital and AAC are the de facto standards for surround sound on streamed video content. Obviously, Microsoft is going to license the codecs. Lossless was never in the cards, as it would double bandwidth requirements for a largely imperceptible difference in quality.

And HD-DVD was Toshiba/NEC. Microsoft just vaguely promoted it.
 
XenIneX said:
Lossless was never in the cards, as it would double bandwidth requirements for a largely imperceptible difference in quality.
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It's not "largely imperceptible", it is imperceptible. Standard Dolby Digital supports up to 640kb/s, which for the limited dynamics of the movie sounds is still plenty. And Dolby Plus goes out to 6144kb/s. That's a fantastic amount of bandwidth for audio only.

I still have not seen a blind test where people could discern 320kb/s compression from anything else better. And yet no professional website or magazine (what's left) will touch this topic.

Even Audoholics with the tag line "Pursuing The Truth In Audio And Video" recently put out this ridiculous comparision.

http://www.audioholics.com/audio-technologies/mp3-vs-high-resolution-audio

Not intended as a blind test, the presentation offered the files for comparison purposes with an announcement of the resolution level at the start of each segment. Each musical selection began with a 192kHz, 24 bit file, followed by a 44.1kHz, 16 bit file, and finally a MP3 file at 320kbit/s.
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Well no wonder people were able to tell the MP3 sounded like crap, you told them every time before hand.

I did this test to myself years ago and it shocked me and it made me walk away from so called audiophile snake oil. SACD died for a reason. Well it died for a couple reasons, but the lack of tangible benefit was the big one.
 
What do they mean by TV shows? From what I understand, they don't have any solution that works with tuners/cablecard.
 
westrock2000 said:
It's not "largely imperceptible", it is imperceptible. Standard Dolby Digital supports up to 640kb/s, which for the limited dynamics of the movie sounds is still plenty. And Dolby Plus goes out to 6144kb/s. That's a fantastic amount of bandwidth for audio only.

I still have not seen a blind test where people could discern 320kb/s compression from anything else better. And yet no professional website or magazine (what's left) will touch this topic.

Even Audoholics with the tag line "Pursuing The Truth In Audio And Video" recently put out this ridiculous comparision.

http://www.audioholics.com/audio-technologies/mp3-vs-high-resolution-audio



Well no wonder people were able to tell the MP3 sounded like crap, you told them every time before hand.

I did this test to myself years ago and it shocked me and it made me walk away from so called audiophile snake oil. SACD died for a reason. Well it died for a couple reasons, but the lack of tangible benefit was the big one.
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AAC archives same levels of transparency at lower bit rates than ac3. AC3 is pretty inefficient towards compression standards. Its even worse than mp3.
but there is no big push to change it since it archived transparency and it take so little of the total multimedia bandwidth anyway. so improvements only give minor total gains in total filesize.
 
Does anyone know whether this means that Win10 will have a built in Dolby encoder so games can do surround sound through optical without requiring it to be built into the sound card?

1. Most receivers no longer have multi channel analog inputs which is the easiest way to do surround sound.

2. HDMI surround sound is the best but there are a lot of issues with SLI and NV Surround, not to mention resolutions over 1080P and higher refresh rates.

3. Surround over optical is probably the easiest with aggregate current hardware but Dolby Digital Live encoding support is almost random - even a lot of high end motherboards do not include it.

Having 5.1 encoded surround sound as a baseline in Win10 would be fantastic.
 
DoubleTap said:
Does anyone know whether this means that Win10 will have a built in Dolby encoder so games can do surround sound through optical without requiring it to be built into the sound card?

1. Most receivers no longer have multi channel analog inputs which is the easiest way to do surround sound.

2. HDMI surround sound is the best but there are a lot of issues with SLI and NV Surround, not to mention resolutions over 1080P and higher refresh rates.

3. Surround over optical is probably the easiest with aggregate current hardware but Dolby Digital Live encoding support is almost random - even a lot of high end motherboards do not include it.

Having 5.1 encoded surround sound as a baseline in Win10 would be fantastic.
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I'm going with 'no'. Encoder licensing fees run $8/unit for the patents alone. If you think MS is going to shell out ~$8b for a feature almost no one will use, when they just canned Media Center which only needed a straight port from the existing Win8 codebase, I've got a bridge to sell you.

And you don't want what you're asking for anyway. Dolby Digital Live adds about 100ms of latency to audio (32ms frame encode + 32ms frame decode + overhead), making sync a nightmare for interactive content. Long story short, there's reasons DDL died in a fire a decade ago.
 
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