Hardware DTS decoding

[Jessie]

Is there anything the XBMC or Rasberry Pi communities can do to get a positive reply from DTS/MPLA? Surely something can be done. It would make the Pi the ultimate Mediacenter machine! The license would be an instabuy!

If the DTS people haven't responded after repeated attempts then I wonder how feasible this idea is...

RPi publicly announces that they are going to start selling licenses fot DTS decoding, stating that they have tried to contact DTS with no reply. RPi then sells licenses, and squirrels away the proceeds for a time when/if the DTS people get in touch.

That ought to get the attention of the DTS folks and get DTS decoding into the hands of the users who are more than happy to pay the licence fee.

Or just create a firmware "bug" that enables DTS and leave it to the community to support this undocumented "bug". That may get you a call back.

Then claim your server was hacked and this buggy firmware was never ment to get out. I guess these devious ideas are a good indication why I don't run a charity.

[gman529]

I have already started going through my collection and moving everything to h264 and AAC. If we get then I won't have to keep re-encoding all of movies. Some body that uses an RPi has to know somebody that works there. Come on Community get involved .

[primera16]

im assuming that this company http://www.dts.com/ deal with the licence?

if so this is the twitter account https://twitter.com/DTS_Inc
hopefully hundreds if not thousands of polite requests to get in touch with some1 at the foundation, might just get the ball rolling.

also on the website in the privacy policy section there’s this email address licensingadministration@dts.com

[gman529]

Come on Community, lets hit twitter and send polite pleas to DTS_inc. We need to get involved and let DTS know how much this would mean to us to get this great codec on the pi.

[Kainz]

Sure hope that we hear from Dolby :/

[1080p_at_35b]

Judging by this page:

http://www.dts.com/corporate/contact-us.aspx

DTS do not seem to have an office in England. They have offices in Ireland and Northern Ireland though. I wonder if there is some sort of bizarre jurisdiction issue?

They are big on Asia! China (x2), Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Singapore.

What doesn't make sense is that if it's the MPEG-LA that is handling the licensing, then why stop at VC1 and MP2? They have already allowed the Foundation to licensing those codecs but no DTS thanks? Strange.

I wonder if the growth of the Pi is too much of a threat to MPEG-LA for-profit Raspi competitors so the MPEG-LA is ignorant on this issue in a silent attempt to keep a competitive advantage for it's for-profit licensees?

It hurts to know that the XBMC and OMXplayer kids have this already in some repo somewhere, just waiting to flick the switch.

[1080p_at_35b]

Look at this enormous graphical whizbang attempt to attract licensees:

http://www.dts.com/professionals/licensing.aspx

there's even a detailed form:

http://www.dts.com/professionals/become-a-partner.aspx

Hmmm

[1080p_at_35b]

We are fully aware that the downmixing has been fixed by dom which is great.

Now we need DTS hardware decoding..
The PI chokes on DTS decoding in its current form!

Are we? It's news to me. So if I select "Output stereo to all speakers" the Pi will downmix DTS to stereo without any problem?

[masterluke]

Dom fixed an earlier bug where the channel mapping was incorrect when downmixing 5.1 -> 2.0
That now works as intended,

This thread is about the performance issues around DTS downmixing and potentially offloading this to hardware.

[ataraxis]

Contacted DTS over Twitter and Facebook
Received a reply via Facebook that my request was forwared to sales.

Let's see what happens next.

[gman529]

YAY, so they watch facebook, but not twitter. Maybe they will actually get back to the foundation so we can get some DTS lovn'. lol

[jabbera]

I'm hoping for a holiday miracle! DTS please respond.

[sxepride]

+1 for being willing to buy a license! This would be a real gem!

[risk]

I see that cpu is overloaded by XBMC when dealing with DTS, but I'm not entirely sure it's impossible to do DTS in software.
Even with the 'powersave' governor and at 700MHz, mplayer seems to be able to decode DTS in much faster than realtime.
It could be that the codec XBMC is using is inefficient, or that time is wasted on something other than decoding DTS. Someone should profile XBMC to see what the cycles are spent on.

Here's what I used as a benchmark, a random 60s interval from a much larger typical file containing DTS audio.

Code: Select all

[root@pi ~]# time mplayer -novideo -ao pcm:file=/dev/null test.mkv -benchmark -ss $(($RANDOM / 200)) -endpos 60
MPlayer2 UNKNOWN (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer Team
Cannot open file '/root/.mplayer/input.conf': No such file or directory
Failed to open /root/.mplayer/input.conf.
Can't open joystick device /dev/input/js0: No such file or directory
Can't init input joystick

Playing test.mkv.
[mkv] Track ID 1: video (V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC), -vid 0
[mkv] Track ID 2: audio (A_DTS), -aid 0, -alang eng
[mkv] No video track found/wanted.
Detected file format: Matroska
Load subtitles in .
Selected audio codec: DCA (DTS Coherent Acoustics) [libavcodec]
AUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 1536.0 kbit/100.00% (ratio: 192000->192000)
[AO PCM] File: /dev/null (WAVE)
PCM: Samplerate: 48000 Hz   Channels: 2   Format: s16le
[AO PCM] Info: Faster dumping is achieved with -novideo
[AO PCM] Info: To write WAVE files use -ao pcm:waveheader (default).
AO: [pcm] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Video: no video
Starting playback...
A: 199.0 (03:19.0) of 6140.1 ( 1:42:20.1) 19.2% 


BENCHMARKs: VC:   0.000s VO:   0.000s A:  11.538s Sys:   0.201s =   11.739s
BENCHMARK%: VC:  0.0000% VO:  0.0000% A: 98.2863% Sys:  1.7137% = 100.0000%

Exiting... (End of file)

real	0m12.653s
user	0m9.890s
sys	0m1.190s

[1080p_at_35b]

I have written up an explanation of the situation in the OpenELEC forum.

http://openelec.tv/forum/124-raspberry- ... -now#59070

Hopefully this might help generate some more attention.

[goujam]

Im affraid that the DTS liecence may well be very difficult to obtain. Those who have a WD TV will know the problems they have with DTS liecencing, and its been going on for years!!

[sxepride]

At least a reply to the RPi Foundation would be nice. I wrote a short open letter on their Facebook page, feel free to share.

[milhouse]

Does FRAND apply in some shape or form to DTS, in which case are they on dodgy ground by ignoring a potential licensee and effectively withholding the licence?

Presumably Eben completed the "Become a Licensee" web form - and they still didn't reply? If he did and they did not, that's really quite astonishing...

[dom]

Does FRAND apply in some shape or form to DTS, in which case are they on dodgy ground by ignoring a potential licensee and effectively withholding the licence?

Presumably Eben completed the "Become a Licensee" web form - and they still didn't reply? If he did and they did not, that's really quite astonishing...

Yes, Eben has appied to become a licensee and repeatedly contacted them.
Apparently they have a system in place to license hardware (at time of sale), and to license a piece of software. But they say selling a license key that unlocks the hardware is not something they have done before.
They are "looking into it".

[1080p_at_35b]

Yes, Eben has appied to become a licensee and repeatedly contacted them.
Apparently they have a system in place to license hardware (at time of sale), and to license a piece of software. But they say selling a license key that unlocks the hardware is not something they have done before.
They are "looking into it".

Thanks for the update dom. Sounds like DTS need to get flexible. In the meantime though, everyone should keep up the pressure.

@sxepride: Thanks for the support!

@goujam: At this stage, it's highly possible that the Raspi community will find a good-enough solution soon anyway, so if DTS want to lose the opportunity for cash, their loss.

[ataraxis]

@goujam: At this stage, it's highly possible that the Raspi community will find a good-enough solution soon anyway, so if DTS want to lose the opportunity for cash, their loss.

Is this wishful thinking or just around the corner?

[1080p_at_35b]

@goujam: At this stage, it's highly possible that the Raspi community will find a good-enough solution soon anyway, so if DTS want to lose the opportunity for cash, their loss.

Is this wishful thinking or just around the corner?

With XBian 1.0a4 I am able to play a 1920x1040 h264 file with 5.1 DTS smoothly from a NAS box over SMB via a wired connection. In doing so, the Pi appears to use very little RAM as well. This is a first. Until now the same file, in the same circumstances, was stuttering. The video bit rate of this file is about 15 to 20 mega bits so it's not the 40 megabits of the (in)famous full-screen birds testing file that is out there, but it's pretty good. I will admit the film isn't exactly non-stop action however there are fast-moving scenes throughout and the smooth playback continues.

The only stuttering occurs when an overlay, such as the 'Now playing' OSD or one of the audio/video/bookmark dialogues are used. So that is some indication that there is still some room for improvement but as these overlays are temporary, it's not a big deal. Thankfully subtitles do not fall into this category. You can view the very same file with subtitles displaying and everything remains smooth.

As dom has mentioned in this thread, the code is done, we just need the licensing bodies to cooperate.

Keep up the pressure everyone!

[matt_heys]

Yes, Eben has appied to become a licensee and repeatedly contacted them.
Apparently they have a system in place to license hardware (at time of sale), and to license a piece of software. But they say selling a license key that unlocks the hardware is not something they have done before.
They are "looking into it".

Can they not treat it as a software sale then? As all I am buying is text string, that's kind of like software in that it's all bits and bytes. Or is it the fact that the thing doing the decoding will be hardware and the hardware/software license is different?

Either way, time to pull their finger out, 4 months should be plenty of time to look in to it and make a decision, even if its a no to hardware unlock codes, then maybe I could at least buy a new pi with DTS enabled at time of sale.

[ghans]

Oh yeah , the distributors will like that.
Just imagine a board with license and without license
getting mixed up , that is already a case of license fee evasion
if undetected ....


ghans

[mjsandbe]

Well, I have done what little I can. I sent a message to DTS via Facebook and Contact Us on the webpage. I don't have a twitter account.

Please work with Eben Upton and the Raspberry Pi Foundation on DTS licensing for the Raspberry Pi. It is my understanding that Eben Upton and the Raspberry Pi Foundation has repeatedly attempted to contact DTS about licensing DTS for the Raspberry Pi with limited or no success. I am one of many who would be more than willing to pay a nominal fee for a DTS license for the Raspberry Pi, just like I have for licenses for the VC-1 and MPG2 codecs. Raspberry Pi - http://www.raspberrypi.org/