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Old 24th October 2007, 15:48   #407  |  Link
honai
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Quote:
Currently FLAC has an advantage over TrueHD/DTS-HD because it's already supported on HTPC
It's only "supported" in a sense that it can be losslessly decoded, but must be *lossy* encoded to AC3 (via ffdshow or AC3Filter) or DTS (on some DTS Connect soundcards) in order to be played back on a receiver - which is what most HD enthusiasts do, anyway. Transport over 5+1 analog cinch cables makes no sense because no matter how clean the copper, you'll lose audio quality.

Quote:
while TrueHD/DTS-HD is still difficult to decode perfectly on HTPC and is not supported by *any* external media player yet
But TrueHD/DTS-HD is being supported by a growing number of inexpensive external audio receivers, while I didn't hear of any receiver yet that supports FLAC over HDMI.

The point I'm trying to make is that in 1-2 years lots of hardware will do realtime decoding or native transport of TrueHD/DTS-HD, but due to the lack of industry lobbying we won't see that kind of support for FLAC. And as I wrote above, FLAC to PCM over HDMI is going nowhere any time soon because we won't have PC hardware for raw PCM transport from arbitrary sources.

And all TrueHD/DTS-HD -> PCM over HDMI solutions so far only work on a protected audio/video path, so you can't just inject your FLAC -> PCM solution there.

Last edited by honai; 24th October 2007 at 15:50.