Blu-ray - DTS not Dolby?

[kfbkfb]

How did DTS become dominant on Blu-ray releases?

In 1997, DVDs for the European market had to have MPEG multichannel audio if they had Dolby Digital 5.1, Dolby got that changed in late 1997 so that MPEG Multichannel wasn't required, just an option.

How did Dolby lose the battle to become the default soundtrack on Blu-ray discs?


Kirk Bayne

[Paianni]

The Blu-ray spec defines three mandatory audio codecs for releases: Dolby Digital, DTS (both up to 5.1 surround) and LPCM (up to 8 channels). All Blu-ray releases must have an audio track encoded one of these three methods.

The 'Master Audio' layer of DTS-HD Master Audio is, put simply, a subtraction of the DTS core from an uncompressed PCM master, with a DTS 'core' stream contained inside the DTS-HD stream. This allows for a more space efficient solution for lossless audio than one involving a Dolby TrueHD track, as a Dolby Digital, DTS or LPCM track would still be needed to accompany it as the TrueHD stream does not contain a mandatory codec.

Now you might ask, why don't all Blu-rays use LPCM for the main (usually English) audio track? There is one other benefit after all; no need to pay DTS or Dolby for licensing their tech. The main problem is that although SPDIF has the bandwidth required to carry a 5.1 mix at 16-bit/48kHz, it cannot carry more than two channels of PCM audio, so it cannot be fed to old-fashioned AV receivers (those without HDMI inputs) unless the player has analog outputs for 5.1 or higher, or the player can encode Dolby Digital or DTS on the fly from an LPCM stream on a Blu-ray disc. Neither of those facilities are mandatory and a typical consumer cannot be expected to understand the situation, LPCM is not widely used as a result.

[Wendell R. Breland]

Originally Posted by kfbkfb

How did DTS become dominant on Blu-ray releases?

This is a IIRC, Roger Dressler (Dolby Labs, retired) said DTS provided a simple plug-in software for the creation of BD that was easy to use.

Dolby Atmos seems to be the dominate immersive audio format on BD and UHD BD.