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Wii To Have No Dolby Digital Out


MBJ

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A story just posted over at IGN confirms that Nintendo has stated that the Wii will not have Dolby Digital output. The system will use Dolby Pro Logic II just like the Gamecube. Read the full story HERE.

This is a bit disappointing but not completely surprising given Nintendo's lack of support for HD video on the upcoming console. That being said, it would have been a nice option.

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It would also be interesting to find out how much royalties cost for Dolby Digital vs. Dolby Pro Logic II. My guess at that would be DD is more expensive.

Also another thing Nintendo might be factoring in is that while Hi-Def is certainly the "in thing" to get now and is the future of the living room, a lot of people in the world still have older stereo TV sets and no 5.1 surround system. As a console designer, do you take out the expensive cutting-edge stuff that maybe only 1% of your customers would have/use and cater a lower cost console to the other 99%? (figures made up, i'm only guessing here).

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I can see Nintendo avoiding DD out for cost cutting reasons but one of the features that I was looking forward to with the Wii was DVD playback. It would be a shame to playback a DD 5.1 DVD over stereo out.

That being said, Nintendo has made it very clear that this will NOT be a multifunction multimedia device but a gaming machine. In my opinion they might as well just forego DVD playback alltogether if there's no DD out option.

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Is the pro logic just a simulated 5.1? Is that the major difference?

All it does is take a 2 channel output, derive a left, centre, and right output, and outputs a mono surround to "fill in" as surround sound. Of course, this only works best on recordings that are encoded in "dolby surround". If not (ie. just a regular stereo recording), DPL can tend to muddy things up a bit and make it sound quite wretched to discerning ears.

The advancements since the original Pro Logic came out are incredible, they're refined the technology as circuitry and chips became more powerful and less expensive and use matrix technology to simulate the surround effects.

I haven't checked the specs of the Wii as they can change at any time since they're not really set in stone, but hopefully they will allow it to be Pro Logic II which is the updated version that can effectively encode non-dolby sources into 5.1 surround.

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The Wii (as current specs state) will have Dolby Pro Logic II.

Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks can be output through right and left stereo out jacks as Pro Logic. Most every DVD player on the market does this. Considering that fact, I don't see why the big N could have done that rather than sticking with PL2.

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I don't think that in 2006, having DVD playback on a console is an important selling feature anymore. The PS2 had it, but playback quality was quite disappointing. The Xbox had it, but you had to get the DVD Kit with the remote control. Nintendo has always stayed away from DVD playback because quite frankly, a dedicated DVD player is very cheap these days and it simply isn't worth Nintendo's time to design and support a feature that you can buy elsewhere for $29.99.

The other big reason for not having Dolby Digital has to do with game development. Nintendo doesn't only want the console to be affordable, they want the games to be cheap too, and for that to happen, the cost of producing games has to stay low. It is a pain in the arse to produce DD 5.1 audio as it requires a rather elaborate studio setup. It's even more painful to have 5.1 in-game sound since that requires a fully-blown 5.1 sound engine from start to finish, which usually means licensing a 3rd party engine because 5.1 is more than just adding channels to a stereo mixer, not to mention the actual encoding process to spit out AC3 on the digital line, that eats up tons of CPU or requires a dedicated processor.

DD 5.1 might be fine for a 400$ Xbox 360, or a million-dollar PS3 ;) but Nintendo's 200$ console just can't stomach it.

I can see Nintendo avoiding DD out for cost cutting reasons but one of the features that I was looking forward to with the Wii was DVD playback. It would be a shame to playback a DD 5.1 DVD over stereo out.

That being said, Nintendo has made it very clear that this will NOT be a multifunction multimedia device but a gaming machine. In my opinion they might as well just forego DVD playback alltogether if there's no DD out option.

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Just as a sidenote, DPLII takes advantage of the cheesyness of surround sound, as it is a simple mixing matrix. It extracts the center channel from the sum of L+R, the rear channels by subtracting L-R with various coefficients to derive a simulated stereo effect, and the the .1 LFE channel is merely a low-pass filter at 120hz.

One of the benefits of this technique is that it will "enhanced" non-surround sources by throwing a tiny bit of sound from the rear speakers, as well as deriving the LFE channel algorithmically. It is also far easier to render surround content this way, as it still only requires 2 channels throughout the sound engine, and you can still throw in "fake" surround simply by running it through the encoding matrix, which is nothing more than one float multiply for each channel. This can be done in real-time without taxing the CPU much at all.

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