DVD audio Tools 09.09

DVD audio Tools aims to provide audio enthusiasts with a set of free software tools to enable the authoring of DVD-Audio disks compliant with hardware DVD-Audio players, plus a software player for such disks.

What is DVD-Audio?

DVD-Audio is a standard for storing uncompressed high quality stereo or multi-channel audio content on a standard DVD disk. Supported sampling frequencies range from 44.1KHz (the Red-Book CD Audio standard) up to 192KHz, with sampling depths of 16, 20 or 24 bits.

A single DVD can contain both DVD-Audio content (in the AUDIO_TS directory) and DVD-Video content (in the VIDEO_TS directory). Most DVD players only recognise and playback the VIDEO_TS content, but an increasing number of dual-format players can play the contents of the AUDIO_TS as well. Such players will display the DVD-Audio logo.

A single DVD-Audio disk is referred to as an Album. An Album can consist of up to 9 Groups, each containing up to 99 Tracks. In addition, the contents of the AUDIO_TS directory can contain references to objects in the VIDEO_TS directory (but not vice-versa).


IMPORTANT NOTE

In addition to uncompressed audio, the DVD-Audio standard supports a proprietary lossless compression scheme called Meridian Lossless Packing and various methods of encrypting and watermarking the content. This project does not and will not deal with those parts of the standard and will therefore never be able to playback commercially produced DVD-Audio disks.