The BDA (Blu-ray Disc Association) has announced that they have officially added the Chinese-developed DRA (Dynamic Resolution Adaptation) technology to the 2.3 BD-ROM specification as an optional audio format.
The intellectual property rights to the audio encoding and decoding technology are owned by the Chinese government and the technology is seen as a way to help Chinese technology companies avoid the high licensing fees associated with similar technologies from DTS and Dolby.
The move from the BDA could also be seen as a way to head off competition in China from the Chinese government’s competing high definition optical format, China Blue High-definition Disc (CBHD), which is based on Toshiba’s defunct HD DVD format.
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WOW, another lossy codec but one from China. And for a disk format that far from needs a compression codec for audio. Blu-ray has more than enough room for losless and LPCM, why would it waste it’s time on a Chinese MP3? This ‘option’ has as much of a chance as FM broadcasters using the FM Quadraphonic option. I would say Dolby FM, but Dolby has a better chance. I am curious about this though, because I can’t even invision a codec with a high lead content. :-P
Andy,
I believe this codec is intended solely for use in China so Chinese manufacturers can legally avoid paying the high licensing fees to Dolby and DTS, yet still include a fully-supported lossless codec in the players.