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SAN FRANCISCO (December 19, 2011) — Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (NYSE:DLB) today announced it has engaged Sid Ganis to support its cinema business and expand relationships with the industry’s creative leaders. Ganis, who most recently served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), will advise senior management on a variety of initiatives to better serve the creative, production, and exhibition communities. Ganis is one of the most recognized and respected motion picture executives in recent history. He has held various global corporate and strategic positions at Sony Pictures Entertainment, including president of worldwide marketing for Columbia TriStar, vice chairman of Columbia Pictures, and president of marketing and distribution for Columbia Pictures, as well as key posts at Lucasfilm, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Twentieth Century Fox.

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-19-2011, 03:20 PM:
 
One painfully obvious situation Dolby needs to remedy is Dolby Media Encoder and its other similar software applications. The software runs only on Mac OSX. There is no Windows-based counterpart.

Rhetorical question: why is this a problem? OSX is a better operating system, right?

Virtually all mass-produced titles on Blu-ray are authored on Windows-based systems. Enterprise level applications like Sony Blu-code & Blu-print or Sonic Scenarist run only on Windows. If a movie authoring project is to include Dolby TrueHD audio that audio must be encoded on a different computing platform outside of the standard work flow. By comparison, DTS made its DTS-HD Master Audio encoding suite available for both Mac and Windows operating systems and priced it much lower per seat than Dolby's application. I think this is a pretty significant reason why so many movies on Blu-ray have DTS-HD Master Audio rather than Dolby TrueHD. DTS is winning in both terms of cost and convenience to disc authors.

Apple has made it abundantly clear it does not like physical media at all. Audio in the Internet streaming space is lossy, lower quality. If surround sound is used chances are it will just be good old standard Dolby Digital. No one really needs to buy a standalone encoding application to do DD 5.1 since many video authoring suites already have DD encode included.
 

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Posted by Aaron Garman (Member # 1653) on 12-20-2011, 12:48 PM:
 
I guess that means any Blu-ray with a TrueHD track was partially or completely made on a Mac.

AJG
 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-20-2011, 01:58 PM:
 
That would only be partial. While Dolby TrueHD encoding would have to occur with Dolby's Mac-based software, the resulting audio tracks would have to be ported over to a PC where the actual Blu-ray disc authoring is taking place. Virtually all Blu-ray titles being sold through retail outlets are authored using PC-based tools. Few movies on Blu-ray are encoded with Dolby TrueHD audio; most feature DTS-HD.

DTS is arguably doing a better job covering both Mac and PC platforms with its own audio encoding software than Dolby is managing just going Mac only. DTS-HD Master Audio suite is available on both Mac and PC platforms for around $1500. They have a $249 DTS-HD audio encoding plug-in for Apple Compressor. The DTS Surround suite is a standalone app for encoding lossy DTS formats for BD, DVD & CD. They have a couple of Pro Tools plug-ins. For $29 you can add DTS-HD 7.1 decode capability to the Quicktime player (it's included with the Compressor plug-in).

has used the encoding software from both Dolby and DTS. He said DTS' stuff was much easier to use.
 

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