Dolby Digital Plus

Dolby Laboratories was showcasing its new Dolby Digital Plus format, slated to appear in Dolby Digital encoded soundtracks, HD-DVDs, and digital cable television programming. Dolby Digital Plus is a highly sophisticated and versatile audio codec based at its core on Dolby Digital and designed specifically to adapt to the changing demands of future audio and video delivery and audio storage systems, while simultaneously retaining backward compatibility with existing Dolby Digital decoders. Dolby Digital Plus has also been selected as a standard audio format for HD-DVD.

Features

• Multichannel surround sound with discrete channel output.
• For broadcast: Higher coding efficiency complements new video compression technology.
• For packaged media: Allows for fully discrete audio performances of 7.1 channels and beyond.
• Based at its core on Dolby Digital technology, ensuring backward compatibility with existing Dolby Digital decoders.
• Supports data rates as high as 6 Mbps.
• Accurately reproduces media sound the way the director and producer intended.
• Interactive mixing and streaming capability.

Benefits

• Compatible with the nearly 40 million home entertainment systems equipped with Dolby Digital in households today.
• Delivers the highest lossy audio quality possible.
• Allows multiple languages to be carried in a single bitstream.
• High-quality audio with less bandwidth.
• Maintains quality at more efficient bit rates ( < 320 kbps for 5.1-channel audio).
• Provides a pathway for more surround sound content in next-generation video transmissions.
• Set-top boxes upconvert bitstream to 640 kbps for seamless compatibility with existing receivers via S/PDIF.
• Opportunity for higher audio performance in existing systems equipped with Dolby Digital when 5.1 core is extracted from the packaged media stream.
• No latency or loss of quality in upconversion.
• Takes advantage of new wider bandwidth media for more than 7.1 channels of enhanced-quality audio at up to 6 Mbps.
• Provides content producers and artists with many more multichannel options.
• Candidate standard for the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) future robust channel specifications for DTV; under consideration as a standard for satellite TV.
• Chosen as a standard audio format for HD-DVD.

This new standard ensures that not only will the picture quality improve with the advent of the hew high definition DVD formats, but the audio quality will advance as well.

For more information, please visit www.dolby.com .