[MPlayer-users] [OT] AC3 vs. DTS

[Alexander Roalter]

Rich Felker wrote:
> How do you call this plain vanilla? No offense, but dubs are pure crap
> and even more of a waste of space than including both DTS and AC3.
> Maybe you mean director's commentary, but that's just a single stereo
> track and can be done at very low bitrate, if you insist.

I'm actually talking about director's commentary, which LOTR has 4 of
'em. No need for dubbed versions here, too. And I'm also not into that
DTS thing, especially since here in germany only the dull dubbed version
gets the dts treatment, which is a complete waste of space!

> We're not talking about a theater here, but sitting down to watch a
> movie with your friends in your home. Do you really want to spend an
> hour copying the movie to hdd after everyone picks which title they
> want to watch? By that time everyone will be bored and gone home, or
> too drunk to care about a movie... ;)

Ok, but watching 4 hour movies is not something most pals agree with
only from a mood or so, this kind of long sith-throughs are well planned
days or even weeks ahead, so there's no problem. And there's still the
possibility for a 2nd DVD reader and seamless switching, just as they
did in theaters before they put the film on platters. Most movies I pick
for friends are already called of if they last longer than 120 minutes -
that's the new attention span people are trained to nowadays.

> By fixing the errors in the encode, like blocking, noise, hard
> telecine, ... The mpeg2 encoding on DVDs is atrociously bad, and it
> requires heavy processing that's not really feasible in realtime to
> fix it.

Here I'm at a loss. Ok, wrong telecine I know can be fixed, i.e. I have 
"Star Trek: The Motion Picture", where the movie changes Telecining in
the middle
of the movie for about 3 quarter of an hour, only to switch back later.
This clearly 
is an encoding/mastering error, but can be corrected with the correct
vf:phase=U or something like this. 

But how do you fix blocking/noise? Once it's in the picture, how do you
get rid of it? You can only estimate/interpolate new pictures, but these
won't never be the same as the original image - though occasionaly it
might look better than the version presented on DVD.

 
> Heavily protected? Any cryptography where the attacker has the key is
> not heavily protected, it's just basic obscuring/obfuscation and will
> be cracked in no time, just like CSS.

That's really my hope, but hey, i only started watching DVDs on my
computer in 2001, so I'm fine with some time passing before being able
to play the things, if things are only coming somehow/sometime.

cheers,
Alex