DVD-BOY said:

SilverWook said:

Since many early Blu Ray titles have nice uncompressed PCM tracks, all these dueling audio codecs seem unnecessary. But they had to find a way to make my less than five year old receiver obsolete didn't they? ;)

I can hear the difference between Dolby Digital and DTS on DVD, but hearing any subtle differences on Blu hasn't happened for me yet.

With regards to multi-channel PCM, I think one of the reasons it has been dropped as an option by most studios is that firstly it took up too much disc space (Stereo 24bit WAV is about 2Mbps, so 6 channel is about 6Mbps). Also, in legacy AV receivers, you don't get a proper 5.1 track, just a Pro-Logic track, so studios still had to include something like a Dolby or DTS track on there anyway.

Which was the whole point of having analog 5.1 outputs on the players and inputs on your old receiver to begin with. (Same with the early days of DVD.) They finally got back to the uncompressed audio we always had with Laserdisc, and then they drop it so they can cram in crap that makes movies take forever to load, and most people are never going to bother with twice. None of those BD Live extras are going to be available forever either.

I guess it will be the odd music video or concert title that will even have PCM in the future.