[evil-zen]

Quote:

Originally Posted by smeagol what will the soundcard must be capable of to read dvd -a? and didn't anyone find a possibility to rip them? that's weird..there must be a way. not for piracy, for my convenience. i have all my cd's in ape format on my hdd....

All soundcards work with powerdvd 6. It is of course better to use a good soundcard worthy of a DVD-A and not some resampling card.

 

[Beauregard]

Quote:

Originally Posted by JaZZ ... The best you can do is make your soundcard record through the digital connection between its digital input and the DVD-A player's digital output. In most cases you'll get a signal downsampled to 48 kHz (and 24 bit), but after all that's still better than redbook.

According to this item from Benchmark: "When the copy protection is activated, 16-bit, 48-kHz output is usually what results when playing 24-96, or 24-192 kHz material."

There's a heckuva lot of confusion about digital output from DVD-A! Jazz, do you have a source for your info that protected output is 24 bit vs 16 bit? For someone considering digital out from DVD-A, the difference in word length is a crucial consideration. Even the quote above hedges by saying "usually" so it's not at all clear to me if there's variablitiy among players, copy protection schemes, or whatever. Sheesh... it shouldn't be this perplexing.

Best,
Beau

 

[JaZZ]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Beauregard According to this item from Benchmark: "When the copy protection is activated, 16-bit, 48-kHz output is usually what results when playing 24-96, or 24-192 kHz material." There's a heckuva lot of confusion about digital output from DVD-A! Jazz, do you have a source for your info that protected output is 24 bit vs 16 bit? For someone considering digital out from DVD-A, the difference in word length is a crucial consideration.

You may very well be right with the 16 bit. I don't have any info on the subject, I just heard of the «usual» downsampling, but not of downsizing of the wordlength, so the above was just an uninformed assumption. BTW, is there a way to find out the data format when hooking up a DVD-A capable player to the computer?

 

[Beauregard]

Quote:

Originally Posted by JaZZ ...BTW, is there a way to find out the data format when hooking up a DVD-A capable player to the computer?

Good question... NeilPeart has been my go-to guy for DVD-A and Glassman has posted about a new product he's working on that will address some of the issues discussed in this thread. Maybe one of them will jump in...

 

[dip16amp]

RME cards have DIGICheck software that show bit usage statistics.
See http://www.rme-audio.com/english/techinfo/digich.htm

 

[xluben]

DVD Ripping

Here are links to what you will need to rip a DVD (or DVD-A):

http://www.dvddecrypter.com/index.php?act=download

http://www.dvdr-digest.com/software/...file=dvdshrink

If you just want to rip the DVD-A to your computer you will probably only need the first link. It will leave you with a DVD image that you will have to mount (with Nero, Alcohol 120, Daemon Tools...) or burn to a DVD, and then you'll still need to watch it using PowerDVD or some other DVD program.

Also, a normal DVD (not sure about a DVD-A) is about 8GB's uncompressed. This is not a burnable size (and wastes a lot of hard drive space) unless you use the second link to compress it. With the second link you may be able to rip just the "music" (no menus or music videos or extras) but you'll still need to use a DVD program to hear/watch it.

To extract just the audio from a DVD-A you'll probably have to rip it, and then use another program to extract just the audio tracks you want. This would probably take hours to set up and convert/extract everything you want. I don't think that it would be worth your time. Also with extracting (to a .wav or .mp3 I assume) you probably won't be able to get surround sound and may lose audio quality.

So, I think this is probably just a big waste of time, I only have one DVD-A (Linkin Park Reanimation), and the only thing I really like it for is 5.1 surround sound and music videos. I don't think it's worth it just for use with headphones.

 

[Mr.Radar]

DVD Decrypter is for decrypting DVD-Video discs. DVD-Audio discs use a yet-unbroken encryption system and so cannot be decrypted. That will not, however, stop you from reading unencrypted discs. The problem with unencrypted discs is that they're probably encoded in MLP (Meridian (as in the makers of the G08 and company) Lossless Packing) which AFAIK no software (except PowerDVD or WinDVD) can decode. The process you describe would rip the DVD-Video layer which would have the audio encoded in Dolby Digital or DTS, which you'd be able to play at full quality on any computer with a DVD-ROM and DVD player software anyways (though "full quality" for DVD-V is 16/48 vs. 24/96 or 24/192 for DVD-A).

 

[noir]

i fully agree with Mr.Radar here.
(but afaik, max resolution for DVD-V is 24bit/96khz PCM; unfortunately its, afaik, never been used)

For DVD-A, the only way to catch the undecoded stream would be to fetch the data after decompression by MLP.
At this point, the sound data is a raw PCM stream, after its sent to the soundcard. If its possible to intercept that stream and write it to, lets say, a wav file, we would finally have a way to record dvd-a on our computer in full res (which is legal by european standards: you're allowed to make a back-up copy of your bought discs). Naturally it would be nicer to store MLP-compressed tracks on our HDs... but that will, imo, stay an illusion for now.

 

[Beauregard]

Quote:

Originally Posted by noir (but afaik, max resolution for DVD-V is 24bit/96khz PCM; unfortunately its, afaik, never been used)

The Chesky DVDs and the DADs from Classic Records are DVD-V (not DVD-A) that have 24/96 PCM stereo tracks. I believe this is also true of the DVD side of the AIX DVD-A discs.