Archive for February 7th, 2007

HD-DVD decoding

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

For those whom it may interest.
What are the things needed to play HD-DVD movies in open-source multimedia player?

  • Decrypted movie (use this tool)
  • Demuxer support
  • Video decoder
  • Audio decoder

EVO demuxer is really just slightly modified MPEG stream demuxer. FFmpeg and MPlayer fresh SVN versions support it (MPlayer was there first). I don’t know about other multimedia players but that’s quite easy to implement.

Video decoding: there are three possible choices – MPEG-2, H.264 and VC-1. First two should work fine, the last one should work but with some bugs (I will fix them eventually).

Audio decoding: is also tricky – standard AC3 audio will work, DTS is supported via libdca and E-AC3 is still to be figured out.

Conclusion – try current SVN of MPlayer and see if it works to you. And if you care about Blu-Ray support (and it does not work) – please provide a sample.