Quote Originally Posted by Mr Peabody
LJ, the Dolby article says the disc itself would have to be encoded to allow the HD signal to bypass the internal decoder in the player. Any idea if movie companies are going to cooperate to allow this. Even though the equipment will allow it still doesn't mean it's happening.

All parties involved need to get their act together because if we are confused about it, the average consumer doesn't have a chance. Especially as most of them get their information from hourly wage earning students working at the mass merchants.
Apparantly, both BR & HD DVD have players that are able to output raw bitstream data via HDMI 1.3 for decoding and is able to bypass the advanced authoring. This article was updated on Nov. 14th.

"Since this article was first written, Toshiba has implemented a firmware upgrade to their HD-XA2 and HD-A35 HD DVD player models that adds a feature called "Direct Digital Audio Mode." This function serves as a workaround for the Advanced mode bitstream limitation. When activated, the player will transmit the raw audio bitstreams for any of the new high-resolution sound formats to a receiver for decoding, even on Advanced discs. However, it will only transmit the movie soundtrack itself, not any additional content such as menu beeps or Picture-in-Picture audio. The upcoming Onkyo DV-HD805 HD DVD player will presumably also offer this function. Some recent Blu-ray players such as the Samsung BD-P1400 and the Panasonic DMP-BD30 have a similar feature."

http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/sh..._Necessary/853

This article was updated in October, so maybe it's not completely accurate concerning HD DVD.

"When this thread was first created, there was no need for HDMI 1.3. The situation is changing slightly. Due to the slow adoption of DTS-HD Master Audio decoding in players, and the recent release of players which can output bistream DTS-HD Master Audio and HDMI 1.3 receivers with DTS-HD Master Audio decoders, it may be desirable in certain situations to get an HDMI 1.3 receiver with the newer audio decoders onboard.

It should be noted, though, that just because a player supports bitstream output doesn't mean it will be able to output bitstream. In the HD DVD world, there's an advanced content flag which, according to what I have read, can't be ignored. The advanced content (interactive audio,) must be mixed by the player. To send bitstream audio, the player would have to encode the audio, after mixing, to something like TrueHD which seems like an unlikely feature in the near future.

It seems Blu-ray will allow for bypassing audio mixing, so Blu-ray owners are more likely to be interested in receivers with decoders, especially if DTS-HD Master Audio becomes more common for soundtracks, and decoding is not being implemented in Blu-ray players."


http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=789994