[Vorbis] Does Ogg Vorbis support 5.1 surround?

[Ralph Giles]

On Thu, Aug 05, 2004 at 09:21:22AM -0400, Cory wrote:

> As most of you all know, DVD's have 5.1 audio, and I want to preserve
> that in my voribs files.  So, to ask the question : Does it support
> Surround sound?

Yes and no. There are two issues here. Vorbis does support 6 channel (or
any other number of channels) just fine. So in that sense it works.
However, there are currently no tuned modes for 5.1 surround. This means
the compression will be less effecient than it could be until someone
publishes such modes.

The other is that the surround audio on DVD is already compressed with a
lossy perceptual codec, so re-encoding that as vorbis will always be
lower quality than if you had access to the uncompressed soundtrack,
like what music cds give you.

Hope that helps,
-r