Dolby TruHD on BD

[Chris Beveridge]

A debate over time that has heated up recently involves why Warner does not have TruHD tracks on BD releases that they provide on HD DVD. This has become more prominent during CES due to the TotalHD solution.

Questions were asked and nobody appeared to have answers.

Then a post from MS Amir indicates that he believes it's for two reasons:

1) It's not mandatory
2) It's implemented differently.

First, I and others call BS on #1. Whether people accept it or not, the PS3 is a multimedia component. I'm downloading trailers (and likely eventually movies), I'm doing photos, I'm doing music, I'm browsing the net, I'm playing DVDs and I'm playing BDs. And yeah, I'm playing PS1, PS2 and PS3 games. There are a million of these out there in peoples hands worldwide right now in REGION A. It's TruHD compliant. There are far more of these than HD DVD including the 360 Strap-On.

Second, MS Amir indicated that it's implemented differently in that it needs to be done as 7.1 channels. That would mean that a 5.1 track that's on HD DVD would have to have two dummy channels added which would require new work. This was posted at AVS.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...&&#post9436012

Sony's "paidgeek" responds:

It is not a problem to encode 5.1 Dolby lossless. There is no requirement to have "dummy channels".

Even more, Dolby's Roger Dressler stated at AVS:

TrueHD is the same for both disc formats, and the same file can technically be used on both. There may be other reasons why this is not being done.

This leaves us with several things:

1) What is the real reason why it isn't done
2) What needs to be done to have it happen
3) Why does anyone listen to MS Amir anymore?