[vorbis] WMA Pro vs.. Ogg Vorbis - Hurry up, guys

[Christian Buchner]

On the WMTalk mailinglist (a Microsoft operated mailinglist covering all topics about Windows Media),
Microsoft recently revealed plans with their "Corona" project.

Corona comprises of new audio and video codecs targeted at DVD and high quality movie playback.
Amir Majidimehr (head of the codec group at M$) has been talking some tech about "WMA Professional",
which will be able to encode 5+1 channels in a single bitstream.

WMA Pro currently requires a soundcard with 6 analog outputs (there are some on the market) and a
receiver with 6 analog inputs. Microsoft has currently no plans to license a Dolby Digital encoder from
Dolby Labs so that's why currently there's only analog output.

Third party vendors might, however, offer soundcards that do Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding in realtime
(like the x-box is cabable of, for example). But I doubt these will be cheap.

Microsoft has obviously signed agreements with manufacturers of chipsets to develop integrated
circuits capable of decoding "Corona" content (this has been in the news, recently). Amir was also
very optimistic about hardware WMA Pro receivers being available in the future (like today's Dolby
Digital and Sony DTS receivers).

So where is the connection to Ogg Vorbis?

Well, I just think you guys should hurry up releasing an Ogg Vorbis codec which is capable of
doing multichannel coupling (like 5.1). If this were available as an ACM codec, people might
prefer to use Ogg Vorbis instead of WMA Pro for encoding their movie audio (from DVD). The
main application I see for end users is of course to encode the soundtrack for DivX ;-) movies.
What else would you use 5.1 for?

Christian

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