I noticed this whole section in the forum, but I didn't see the DVD-Audio nor the SACD logos on the home page. Are those formats included in the LaserDisc Database?

It's part of my projects whenever-I-can-spare-a-week-end-to-code-it.
But I'd like to insert my DTS/DVD-A/SACD into there as well some day!

Julien

Discogs is just doing it way better than I could ever... so my collection moved there.

However, I added DVD-A as a format for the Hardware Database.

Was there any specificity to the DVD Audio players? Or could they play in DVD Audio without limitations?

Julien

I know that you can play most DVD-Audio discs in a regular DVD player (my brother was getting DVD-A discs when I got our first DVD player), but to get the true 24-bit audio from it you need a player with the DVD-Audio specification.

When we played DVD-A discs, we could only access the 5.1 (I believe) Dolby Digital soundtrack on them and nothing else.

I think I have a Widescreen Review magazine with the specs for DVD-A in it (and they were NOT on DVD-A's side--they praised the crap out of SACD back then.) If I can find it I'll scan it and share.

I'm actually not looking for DVD-A discs specs but for possible variations in the capacity of some players with the DVD AUDIO logo not able to access all the features.

I believe DVD AUDIO is essentially a DVD with the AUDIO_TS folder structure and provides up to 192Hz-24bit multi-channel MLP audio, and this depends probably on the DACs used in a specific player.

Julien

you're most likely right since DVD-A discs can be read by standard DVD players.

As for players with the DVD-Audio logo not being able to play all the features, I've only ever owned two DVD-Audio capable players so I can only say I've never had any playback issues with either of them with any of the DVD-Audio discs I own. You would think that if Toshiba were to license the tech to any manufacturer that they would ensure full compatibility, but they didn't seem to be so stringent with HD-DVD (with early dual format blu-ray/HD-DVD players not being able to access all HD-DVD features.) So who knows?

This is essentially correct, but the DVD-A portion also has different encryption that was not cracked for a very long time. On top of the stronger encryption it also had two other copy protections. One was Meridian Lossless Packaging having a "copy control" bit that could force players to use a lower quality output, such as 24bit stereo only for 5.1 tracks.
The other was watermarking. If an audio watermark was detected on unencrypted (ie. copied) audio streams, playback would be silenced.
Playing back this format was a real pain in the early 00s, when tools first came out to rip the high res portion, they relied on hacking the WinDVD software to extract the audio as it played back. Funnily enough, the rips I made with that were 1:1 exact to the later ones done by DVDAExplorer.

For playback formats, if I recall right it supported anything in up to the maximum 9.8 Mbit/s bitrate. 24bit 192KHz Stereo would fit in that uncompressed, but for 5.1 channel they either had to use 24bit 48KHz or use Meridian Lossless Packaging for 96KHz.

Most if not all discs also had a dvd-video portion with standard PCM, AC3, DTS encoded formats, so you could play back the discs even on incompatible players. It was the only content I could play back on those discs in ~2003 or so, but multichannel audio was so extremely impressive even then. And then in 2005 someone made a 4.1 DVDA rip of Dark Side of the Moon and I've been chasing an ideal multichannel audio setup ever since.