Dolby Digital Plus on Bluray? (1 Viewer)

[Wes]

So is there Dolby Digital Plus on Bluray? I think on HD DVD there was on all True HD releases but I seem to just get True HD or DD on my new Blu player on Iron Man. Perhaps Blu does not include DD Plus?

 

[Jeff Robertson]

Just the opposite, actually. I would say 95% of the HD-DVD titles I have contain Dolby Digital + soundtracks. You're going to see more Dolby True HD and DTS HD MA tracks with Blu-Ray. Incidentally, the latter are lossless formats. These are the ones you want to use if your equipment supports it. Consider DD+ a distant memory.

 

[Gekkou]

Dolby Digital Plus on Blu-ray is only for tracks greater than 5.1 channels for some reason. Also, the 640kbps Dolby Digital tracks are of the same quality as the 640kbps DD+ tracks used by Warner Brothers on HD DVD. Universal and Paramount used higher bitrates on theirs though.

I wouldn't worry about it though. Dolby Digital Plus is unnecessary on Blu-ray since there is plenty of room for lossless (Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio) or uncompressed PCM audio. All three are superior to DD+. The only company still releasing some titles without those would be Warner, and once again their Dolby Digital tracks are identical in quality to the Dolby Digital Plus tracks they did on HD DVD.

 

[Wes]

My Bluray player has 5.1 channel out for PCM and True HD (no dts Master built in decoder) and I'm running that into my Multichannel 5.1 input but because of the lack of bass managment in the player I have mixed feelings as to wether I like the uncompessed vs the DD/dts which I might add can be ran in EX and ES mode to give me 7.1. That's where the DD+ may have been nice to use instead of regular DD. But sound as if unless I had HD DVD will not ever get to use DD+!

 

[Michael Reuben]

The reason for the difference is simple.

DD+ was a mandatory format according to the HD DVD specification. Accordingly, all players had to be able to support it. That made it an attractive option for a soundtrack that was meant to be higher resolution than anything DVD was capable of but still took less space than any of the lossless formats.

For Blu-ray, DD+ is an optional format. That means players don't have to support it, which makes it an unappealing choice for content providers.

 

[Mr. Film]

The majority of Blu Rays have lossless audio. I'd say like 90%.