[ILUG] SDMI initiative

[Fergal Daly]

At 00:00 28/09/00, Niall O Broin wrote:
>As the whole point of the exercise is to be able to say "Yah Sucks Booh" -
>we'll make our own player the members of SDMI, this is not really an issue.
>you'd be in the same place you are with a ripped CD track, no ?

Not quite, a ripped CD track hasn't been compressed already. It wouldn't 
make a difference if the compression was lossless, but each time you 
uncompress and recompress you get further away from the original and could 
get artifacts coming through. It's the same as when you make a copy of a 
copy of ... with VHS tapes.

I have no idea how big an effect compressing audio twice would have, 
probably very little but the SDMI player could potentially do something 
really nasty like add a signal to the output that's inaudible but causes 
hassle for the mp3 algorithm. There's something called Macrovision which 
does this for video signals, it makes them virtually untapable, even though 
they look fine on the screen. I have no idea if that's possible for mp3 but 
if it is I'm sure they'll use it, otherwise they'll lose all their street 
cred as an evil corporate entity,

Fergal