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iTunes Movie sound quality?
- Thread starter cupique
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cupique said:
In the keynote, Steve said Dolby surround, so maybe 5.1, but sometimes people call Dolby 2.0 surround.
I don't know.
Chances are, if Apple says "Dolby Surround", they mean real surround, 5.1 or higherprobably not higher since I bet they want to optimize file size as much as possible (and not a huge selection of movies have 7.1 or higher anyway).
unfortunately, it seems the movies are only encoded with Dolby Surround. meaning 2 channel Pro-Logic. this is really the one thing stopping me from buying movies from iTunes. i'm fairly sure this was done because Quicktime doesn't support Dolby Digital (AC3). even with the plug-in i'm sure a lot of you have, it downmixes to 2 channels, it can't seem to pass through the AC3. i can only hope this is planned to be fixed in Quicktime 8... honestly Tiger has many problems with dealing with the digital output.. all hopefully fixed in Leopard.
Confirmed, it is not 5.1 Dobly Digital surround, it is old-school matrixed Dolby Pro Logic, which by today's standards is crap. Pro Logic sounded good about 15 years ago, but today it is hopelessly outdated. I'm amazed to see a new service offer it, especially from a company supposedly pushing advanced technologies such as AAC audio and HD video. QuickTime itself is capable of multichannel audio, and since eventually everything should be coming off the iTV box (which could have had AC-3 hardware decoding built-in), I'm not sure what they were thinking. I have multiple problems with the iTunes video service, but the lack of modern surround sound is a deal-killer for me right off the bat.