Microsoft Edge To Support Dolby Audio 105
jones_supa writes: Microsoft has revealed that its new Edge web browser will come with support for Dolby Audio in order to offer high-class audio when visiting websites. "It allows websites to match the compelling visuals of H.264 video with equally compelling multi-channel audio. It works well with AVC/H.264 video and also with our previously announced HLS and MPEG DASH Type 1 streaming features, which both support integrated playback of an HLS or DASH manifest," Microsoft explains in a blog post. Windows 10 will also ship with a Dolby Digital Plus codec.
I'm not the target audience apparently (Score:1, Informative)
I'm not that big on streaming unless it's my girlfriend's Netflix which I don't even pay for, so I didn't even know sound quality was an issue that had to be addressed in browsers.
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That's OK, it will probably only be used for browser hijacking ads anyway.
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However, being the cynic I am, I wouldn't be surprised to see
the web become even more useless than it already is. There are damned few web sites that I have more than a vague passing interest in, and none that can't do without.
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That's OK, it will probably only be used for browser hijacking ads anyway.
Just imagine how awesome they will sound!
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If there is one thing I truly can not tolerate is a web site screaming ads at me without asking first and especially being arrogant enough to make volume control awkward (even with a media keyboard and a mute button, that sheer arrogance of making volume control awkward infuriates me). Generally earns those sites and their advertising agencies, a script and cookie block, lasting about a year, possibly permanent. Want to show me ads (as in dominates the page), please may I is a prerequisite and be seen and
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Indeed. Web browsers have generally not been on my list of applications that are permitted to play sound, ever since the capability to play MIDI was introduced in Netscape. Why would anyone want that? I do NOT want random websites that I look at to be able to decide what sound comes out of my speakers. I already have a media player, thanks, and the web browser is not it.
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Up Next: Monster Cable Ethernet Protocol (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft will no doubt partner with Monster Cable to come up with a new IP Layer for transporting web pages with perfect fidelity, much the way that Monster Cable CAT-5 provides perfect Ethernet.
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At $45 a foot per cable.
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Re:Dolby??? What's that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Dolby does a lot of good research. That you throw them aside as a relic of the past, while at the same time discrediting them for some of the formats you praise (AAC is a thing in part due in part to Dolby's participation in creating the standard) simply shows that you have a myopic and illogical view of the world.
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They did a lot of good research, but you don't do heavy metal in Dobly.
Re:Dolby??? What's that. (Score:5, Informative)
Thank Dolby Labs for no-hiss DACs, noise-cancelling headphone cans, ADC floor filters, echo and feedback cancellation, cellular handsfree...
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Yes true. Today's browser is the means to create cross platform compatible applications. It's also the reason application development was more complicated than it needed to be. The progression towards better standards both at the visual rendering level and security level has really helped web app developers leverage the browser better.
If it's an HTML only browser you want there are options (even within your existing browsers) but beware of the awful browsing adventure you are about to embark.
Which services does it support? (Score:2)
I already have a media player, thanks, and the web browser is not it.
How many streaming music and video services does your preferred media player support? And how can a new streaming music or video service arrange to be supported in your preferred media player? Finally, how should a browser-based video game play its music and sound effects? Or is the concept of a "browser-based video game" itself abhorrent to you?
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One. It streams from my playlist. Only. Ever.
> And how can a new streaming music or video service arrange to be
> supported in your preferred media player?
Streaming services can go jump in a lake. I listen to what *I* want
to listen to. If I wanted to hear random ear-punishing junk somebody
else picks without consulting me that doesn't match my tastes at all,
I could turn on a radio.
> Finally, how should a br
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Streaming services can go jump in a lake. I listen to what *I* want to listen to.
Then how do you discover new music that matches your tastes?
I can't think of any reason for a video game to be browser based.
Not everybody has privileges to permanently install games to a given machine, and not every game happens to have been ported to a given native platform.
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We're not talking about what you got going on in TheSims.
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Hey, I have been married for more than 20 years and have two children and I'm on slashdot.... He/She can have a girlfriend...
No, no, /.ers can totally be "married for several years", or have no girlfriend at all - either way you're not getting laid. It's that in-between zone that we don't see here. (There's an old joke: put a pebble in a jar every time you have sex until your first anniversary. Remove a pebble from the jar every time you have sex after that. The jar will never be empty.)
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He means Rosey Palm and her five daughters
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If you're running Windows 8/8.1, why would even be running Netflix in a browser? The only time I run Netflix in a browser is when I'm on a Windows 7 machine, and even then, isn't Netflix running in a Silverlight plugin?
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if I'm streaming on my PC it's through Winamp or Windows Media Center. Otherwise, I go through my TiVO.
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No fancy hardware for me, just a laptop and an external, bigger, monitor I watch from afar. I have a 2.1 Gigaware "sound system" (or the integrated soundbar on the monitor when I want something "quieter") and don't watch that many movies or shows, so that's why I instantly recognized I'm not the target audience.
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I'm not running Win8. So there ya go.
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Did anyone actually upgrade willingly to Windows 8? It looks like Wikipedia agrees with my gut feeling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... [wikipedia.org]
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Do Opus or FLAC support directional encoding? I've always dealt with FLAC as a music codec, so it is possible it supports such features.
What I find odd about this announcement is that MS Edge was supposed to be a lightweight browser, now they are tacking on Dolby? What next, will they tack on the old IE as a sub program?
Should have kept the Spartan name (Score:1)
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Finally! (Score:1)
I have been suffering browsing the web with only one audio channel per ear for literally decades.
What to them so long, this is embarrassing. When I go to the movies I get to smell expensive popcorn and experience 6 to 16 channels of high-def audio. Why not on my windows smart phone and my tablet?
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I have been suffering browsing the web with only one audio channel per ear for literally decades.
What to them so long, this is embarrassing. When I go to the movies I get to smell expensive popcorn and experience 6 to 16 channels of high-def audio. Why not on my windows smart phone and my tablet?
The packaging of a phone would need to get larger to accommodate 14 additional ears with each phone. Not good for the environment. This won't happen until you can download the ears from the internet after receiving the phone.
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These two posts are like reading a technical treatise written by Lewis Caroll.
Caught Up (Score:1)
So their web browser finally caught up to their media player from the '90s? Good job, Microsoft!
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How much you want to bet they just embedded the old media player?
Re:Caught Up (Score:4, Insightful)
Everything about the web is like that. We are in the process of doing "on the web" everything we have already been doing locally for decades,
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Everything about the web is like that. We are in the process of doing "on the web" everything we have already been doing locally for decades,
And we're doing it in a way that brings us right back to the era of mainframes. Although far more advanced, the model is highly similar to that of the IBM mainframe systems whose semi-smart terminals understood form fields and submission.
Proprietary codec (Score:2)
Exactly what we don't need.
Re:Proprietary codec (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry - it runs in kernel space for performance.
Disappointing (Score:2, Interesting)
This is only Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD support would have been much, much better and would have helped Dolby which has been losing the high end to DTS HD Master Audio.
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TrueHD needs to die in a fire. DTS is CD-quality audio, while TrueHD and DTS HD-MA are just a waste of space. The latter is always mastered such that you can trivially rip the DTS track when you're ripping the DVD, but TrueHD leaves you with just the AAC track if you don't want to double the size of your rip. TrueHD is a copy-protection measure, nothing more.
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LOL, more like it's audio for people who care about the quality of audio. I use the DTS HD-MA or TrueHD track with my receiver in pure direct mode so that I don't get all sorts of crap filtering and can just listen to the audio as it was intended to be presented (and how you'd hear it if you saw the movie in a theater, though generally with fewer tracks)
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DTS is CD-quality. AAC isn't - you can hear the difference between AAC and DTS. Beyond DTS is a gimmick.
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I have some pure super HD gold fidelity-cables I want to sell to you.
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Neither TrueHD or DTS-MA are ever included on DVDs, so your ripping example is nonsensical.
Ripping involves re-encoding, so just reencode the TrueHD audio on your BluRay rip as you do the video. If you believe that lossy DTS is "CD-quality" then the re-encoded-from-losseless audio should also be entirely acceptable.
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Did you know that a Bluray is a disc, holding video, in a digital format? It's true!
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TrueHD needs to die in a fire. DTS is CD-quality audio...
With very, very few exceptions "CD-quality audio" sucks. Ripping crap gives you more or less lossy crap.
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De da dee da dee da do do (Score:1)
You haven't really heard the Hamster Dance until you've heard it in Dolby
Good news for Netflix (Score:4, Funny)
This is potentially good for Netflix since Windows users have been limited to stereo from Netflix for some time now since Netflix uses Silverlight.
Re:Good news for Netflix (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not a Silverlight limitation. Netflix limits the general web user to stereo for piracy concerns.
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I'm using the Windows 7 media center player version of Netflix, which was been abandoned about 5 minutes after it was released. Apparently Windows 7 is an ancient operating system that no one uses any more.
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Not (entirely) correct. - You can use the Windows 8 App, which gives you Dolby Digital 5.1.
That's the only reason for me to have Windows 8.1 on my HTPC instead of Windows 7...
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No, only supporting codecs that have a known IP licensing path. That's worth paying some money, especially compared to the alternative of relying on the vague and either naïve or cynical IP promises (promises they've shown willingness to walk away from when pressed) from a company which makes no bones about wanting to destroy them.
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Ogg is not in grey IP limbo, especially not Vorbis. I'll agree with you on Google's WebM, but only because it's comedy gold how they got everyone else to agree to use it, then decided to keep h263 support, effectively rendering WebM completely pointless, presumably because it would cost more to transcode all of YouTube than it would to just let all that effort on WebM be rendered completely pointless. And yet they still think people will adopt WebP like being burned once wasn't enough.
Vorbis defunct (Score:2)
Opus has replaced for Vorbis for all use cases AFAIK, since it is better at low bit rates and equal at high bit rates.
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By most accounts Opus is superior - but it's also more recent, so there's a lot of content already in Vorbis format. IE supports neither.
This is NOT new, and there are other problems... (Score:3)
Part of the problem, however, is the perceived shift in both audio loudness and the perceived location of speech. All AC-3 and E-AC-3 content, when properly measured, should play dialog back at -31dB relative to full digital scale. Unfortunately, this makes the codec inherently quieter unless the decoder is set to something called RF mode, which boosts the loudness to -20dB and compresses the audio more heavily. Such control for loudness is not typically found in HTML5-based apps, though the W3C has a committee working on this issue. The loudness can be a particular problem on the Windows 8 tablet devices out there, as many programs in AAC format come pre-normalized to somewhere around -23dB to -24dB relative to full scale. Unless all content is pre-normalized to the same consistent playback level - which AAC ads will definitely not be, and probably not AAC stereo content - there will be an inconsistency of experience.
All of this also presupposes that you have either a proper surround virtualizer or a discrete 5.1 speaker system such as is found in a properly set up home theater. Considering that less than a third of homes have any kind of surround sound in them, and given the loudness issues, I'm not certain what the benefits will be here. But it gets even worse, as dialog in multichannel AC-3 and E-AC-3 is steered to the center channel in most programs, whereas in stereo content it is mixed into left and right without regard to position. This can result in disturbance to the listener. Furthermore, any channel configuration changes to an audio-video receiver will typically cause muting when switching modes between stereo output and multichannel output, potentially interrupting the experience for the listener.
Part of this is the add-on nature of AC-3 and E-AC-3 to Windows and an inherent failure to integrate stereo AAC and HE AAC playback behavior with that of stereo and multichannel AC-3 and E-AC-3. Until then, this will be more of a curiosity than anything substantially improving the consumer's experience, and developers should take note if they believe that HTML5/CSS/Javascript development of their apps can really unify their experience across devices yet.
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All of this also presupposes that you have either a proper surround virtualizer or a discrete 5.1 speaker system such as is found in a properly set up home theater. Considering that less than a third of homes have any kind of surround sound in them, and given the loudness issues, I'm not certain what the benefits will be here. But it gets even worse, as dialog in multichannel AC-3 and E-AC-3 is steered to the center channel in most programs, whereas in stereo content it is mixed into left and right without regard to position. This can result in disturbance to the listener.
I'm deaf in one ear, you insensitive clod!
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Netflix surround sound? (Score:1)
Does this mean that Netflix will (finally) be surround sound through the browser?
Finally! (Score:2)
What about Opus? (Score:1)
Feature (Score:2)
I would pay actual money for a browser that had *no* sound capability.
Or even just one that I could reliably disable sound on.
Just trolling (Score:1)
Mostly for consuming music on YouTube... (Score:2)
It seems that young folk these days use YouTube, and other video sites, a lot to listen to music videos. So probably Microsoft just want another brand to use on its marketing war.
But I don't see how this will actually matter without support from other browsers. Who will waste CPU time and storage to create a stream that only one minor browser can take advantage of?
So this week (Score:1)
It's called Edge? Wasn't it Spartan before? Next week it will be called???? Slashdot poll please!
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This has nothing to do with a web server at all, only the encoding of the content. And the entire point to supporting it within the browser is to make an extension unnecessary.
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