svtmike

I've been conversing over e-mail with tech support at Minnetonka Software about the possibility of playing DVD-Audios burned on DVD-R in the TL player.

The tech mentioned that discs burned with their software were used to test the TL system, so they worked during development, and he contacted the developer at Panasonic to see if any changes were made for the production unit that would preclude DVD-Audios on DVD-R from playing.

The Panasonic guy said there were no changes, and they should play just fine (presuming you author them right and burn them properly and all other reasonable caveats) in the TL player.

I assume that Acura put the DVD-R incompatibility statement in
the manual to avoid making any representation that home-made DVDs of any kind would work, and therefore bringing along the support headaches that would bring.

This is potentially great news for those of us who love our TL sound systems, but miss the convenience of putting bunches of music in the form of MP3 files on a CD and playing them in the car.

Please remember that if you decide to spend $500 on DiscWelder Steel like I probably will, that Acura officially says the discs will not play at all, I am not guaranteeing they will play, and you can't expect Minnetonka to guarantee it either; the risk is entirely your own.

Mike

svtmike

I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and order DiscWelder Steel. I was very happy to find they are having a sale if you order through one of their dealers; I've ordered it for significantly less than the $495 list.

www.discwelder.com

Disclaimer: I am not in any way associated with Minnetonka except that I'm now a customer.

Mike

JonDeutsch

Mike,

Thanks for doing this research! Can you provide a status update on this when you make progress? I'll subscribe to this thread to keep tabs!

Also, with DVD-A burning software, what are the limitations of the amount of audio you can fit onto a single DVD-R? In other words, since DVD-A is compressed losslessly, can you, say, burn 44.1k/16bit tracks into a DVD-A format, and get 3-5 hours of audio on one disc???

Any info greatly appreciated!

Jon

svtmike

The amount of music you can fit on a single disc depends on the bit rate, number of channels, data compression, and software limitations.

The DVD-Authoring tool that I ordered, DiscWelder Steel, has several limits:

- It does not do compression of any kind. If you want to do MLP, you have to buy DiscWelder Chrome + the MLP encoder, which is about a $5000 software combination.

- It supports 16 to 24 bits per sample.

- It supports sample rates from 44.1kHz to 192kHz (stereo).

- It supports sample rates from 44.1kHz to 48kHz (5.1 surround).

- It supports .WAV and .AIFF formats only.

- It supports up to 99 tracks in 1 group.

- It can make only a pure DVD-Audio. The discs are not playable on DVD-Video players.

The capacity for CD-quality (44.1kHz, 16-bit, 2 channels) is roughly 10MB per minute. Put that on a 4.2GB disc, you have roughly 420 minutes (7 hours) of uncompressed, CD-quality music on a single DVD-R.

Mike

JonDeutsch

Mike,

Holy Crap...that is awesome!!! I can't wait to hear about your experience when using the application... and how the burn process goes...and how the TL reacts...

When do you expect the software?

Jon

svtmike

I expect to receive the software sometime next week.

Mike

RavenHwk

Where did you buy your copy from? It says on their website that the "sale" price is only honored if you buy from one of their dealers ...

There are a lot of choices! Which ones are reputable?

svtmike

I bought from audiomidi.com, but have no history with them.

Mike

svtmike

I received discWelder Steel this week, and have played around with it a bit. I've found the following out:

- The TL player will play a DVD-Audio burned to DVD-RW (just experimenting right now, so I'm using rewritable media).
- The sound quality of 16 bit/44.1kHz stereo tracks is excellent.

I haven't had a chance to play around with making some 5.1 tracks.

I'm very pleased so far. I'll post a more complete message when I get some more time with it.

Mike

need4spd

Thanks for keeping us updated! That is good news!

nickpoore

So Mike.
The real question here is...
What's the going rate for you to put my three Christmas CD's onto one DVD-R...

JonDeutsch

Mike,

Thanks so much for the update.

And... I'm really excited about:

1. DVD-RW compatibility
2. DVD-A 44.1k/16bit quality

It seems as though we now have a viable alternative to the lack of "MP3 player." In fact, with the quality being so high, it seems like a better sonic alternative.

I look forward to more information, such as...

1. How many minutes of 44/16 audio did you pack onto one DVD-RW
2. Does the TL accept DVD+R/W?
3. Is it feasible to "copy" published DVD-A discs onto a DVD-RW?

Jon

kevd

What I'm interested in is creating a DVD-A with my selection of individual DVD-A tracks from various other DVD-A discs, can this be done yet?

dnszoom

Mike,

Thanks for all the footwork! I now have another weekend project, hehe.

David

moreace

You said it supports AIFF and WAV only. I used to do wav CDs before burners would burn directly to aiff and just wanted to let you know that both me and my friends cd player stopped working after a while becuase of it, wont even read a normal cd anymore. Does this mean no mp3, or can mp3s be converted to aiff? thanks

svtmike

This cannot be done in part due to (a) the watermarking process used on all DVD-A tracks and (b) the encryption used on most DVD-A tracks. I'll get into a more detailed explanation when I get some time.

Mike

unlemming

I'm not so sure about a CD player that stops working from reading a CD, but anyway. An mp3 can be converted back to a wav without any fuss, but you obviously never get the quality of the original wav file. If you own the music you're much better off ripping it directly and burning original copies

flouie

svtmike,

Can you post the file structure of the dvd-a you created.
I like to know if there are any files in the video_ts folder or is it empty. And what files are in the audio_ts folder besides the aob files.

Thanks.

moreace

It was the wav format, CD player has to work harder to read and burnt out laser. I am guessing. Too many wav cds broke 2 cd players. That is all I know. Wont even recognize a CD anymore

svtmike

I think your diagnosis is ....... faulty.

Mike

princed

According to the website, discWelder Steel should be able to burn 5.1 channel audio. I have several opera DVD-V's that I'd like to make into DVD-A discs. Is there any way to take a stereo or 5.1 channel audio track from a DVD-video disc and convert it to DVD-A???

If so, this software would definitely be worth the money!

svtmike

video_ts is empty.

audio_ts has the following files:

ATS_01_0.BUP
ATS_01_0.IFO
ATS_01_1.AOB
ATS_01_2.AOB
AUDIO_PP.IFO
AUDIO_SV.BUP
AUDIO_SV.IFO
AUDIO_SV.VOB
AUDIO_TS.BUP
AUDIO_TS.IFO
AUDIO_TS.VOB

Mike

svtmike

I've now had some experience with making DVD-A's with Discwelder Steel. For me, this is a great product that does what no other product at its price can.

Plusses:

- Makes pure DVD-A's (not hybrids) that are playable in the TL. I've tested DVD-R and DVD-RW. Both work fine. I don't have a DVD+R/W burner, so I can't say whether + media work as well.

- Allows up to 99 tracks or ~4.7 GB of CD-quality stereo music on a DVD, whichever limit is hit first.

- Supports CD-quality 5.1 surround sound, but sources of that type are few and far between.

- A demo is available that gives a complete feel for the user interface. Creating images and burning DVDs is disabled in the demo.

- Coexists fine on my WinXP system with Roxio EZCD 5 Platinum.

- Sounds just as good as a CD in the TL. The ELS system does a good job of upmixing out to the speakers; no problem with the level of the subwoofer channel.

Minuses:

- Pretty expensive. I got it for $357 on sale. But that's the cheapest you'll find a DVD-A authoring package.

- Makes pure DVD-A's, not hybrids, so I can't listen to them in our Odyssey's RES. I don't spend that much time in there anyway.

- Pretty minimal functionality; there's no layout checking, for instance. Supports only .WAV and .AIFF files. No support for drag-and-drop; each file must be added individually to the layout. Rearranging tracks is not terribly easy. Joe Consumer is not the target market of this software.

- Support for Meridian Lossless Packing (MLP) can be had for a mere $4500 more. Personally, I don't see the utility for the person making "mixer" DVD-A's of CDs to play in the car; MLP's primary purpose is to lower the data rate of the bitstream for high resolution 5.1 DVD-A signals. 16 bit 44.1kHz stereo is not high enough bandwidth to need it.

- Making a full DVD-A is time-consuming and disk intensive. I've got a 2.5GHz P4 system and it takes 50 minutes to an hour to create the DVD-A files and write them out to the DVD. You will need at least 5GB of open space for the temporary files created for a full DVD-A.

- Runs only on Windows, so Mac-only people are out in the cold.

In summary, it's a nice but basic package that allows those of us with huge CD collections to make mixer DVD-As for the car, reducing the number of disks we carry and allowing us to leave our expensive source CDs at home.

If you're a control freak like me, and like to listen to CDs more than the radio, Discwelder Steel is a great accessory to your TL.

Mike

neuronbob

Damm!

But thanks for the update, it's a bit expensive but seems to do the job! Good thing I've got a spare PC lying around.

svtmike

In general, this is not feasible. Most DVD-A's have two levels of copy protection: encryption and watermarking.

Encryption is just what it sounds like, scrambling the data. DVD-A encryption is much stronger than the encryption scheme used on DVD-Video, and to my knowledge has not been cracked.

Even if it were cracked, DVD-A's generally use a "watermarking" scheme developed by Verance, that puts a signal that is supposed to be inaudible but detectable by DVD-A players, which will shut down if a watermarked signal is detected on a non-original disc. I don't know the precise mechanics of the watermarking.

I can tell you, however, that the watermarking works. I have the DVD-Audio of the Doobie Brothers' The Captain and Me. This disk is not encrypted, and one side contains LPCM 192kHz 24-bit stereo in the DVD-V titleset (VIDEO_TS). Since it isn't encrypted, I was able to copy the files to my computer and then use various freewares to turn it into .WAVs; I was going for 96kHz 24-bit .WAVs since DiscWelder Steel supports it. I was able to make the discs, but both my home DVD-A player and the TL player would play about 15 minutes of each track, and then stop. My assumption was this is the watermark protection at work.

Mike

svtmike

There is freeware that will allow you to rip the .AC3 files (Dolby Digital) from a DVD-V, but since it circumvents the CSS encryption on the DVDs, it's quite illegal in the US as that's a DMCA violation. Once you've got .AC3 files, there is other freeware that will allow you to make 6 individual .WAVs from the .AC3 file. I don't know how the fidelity of these would be; I'd think the Dolby Digital would pale in comparison to a DVD-A or even a DTS CD.

There are a bunch of web sites devoted to fair use of DVD content; www.doom9.org and www.hydrogenaudio.com are two that I know of off the top of my head. There are good tutorials out there from people much more expert in these matters than I am.

Mike

tl-lvr

Mike, it would be good to hear your impressions on the differences between Steel and Bronze from a features (or lack of) perspective.

TIA!

svtmike

When I bought Steel, it was version 1.0. I've now got Steel 2.0 (that was a free upgrade). When I look at the feature list for Bronze, it looks to me exactly like Steel 1.0.

The _only_ thing that will be functionally different between discs made with Bronze and Steel in the TL player is:

- Discs made with Steel can have absolutely no gap between tracks. Discs made with Bronze will have a random length (but short) silent gap between tracks.

Gapless is great for those concert DVD's converted to DVD-A, Pink Floyd discs put on DVD-A, and Who rock operas, and the like.

Mike