On 27 Apr 2005 07:26:29 -0700, andy wrote:

Is it usual that consumer DVD players will not play standard audio
files?

Yes

Why? The player will happily play various audio files on CD but, unless
I am doing something wrong, not DVD.


Are you talking about uncompressed formats or compressed formats like wma
or mp3? It is really a firmware issue - maybe Pioneeer have a more
expensive solution that they would like you to buy to play uncompressed
computer files.


However - my suggestion would be to use the DVD Video format which
will
handle stereo 24 bit 96kHz material without any compression.

Thanks for the suggestion. I would expect DVD-Video as a format to last
for a while but I am not sure how recognisable it is as an audio file
format. Using weird formats makes the manipulation of the files
awkward.


DVD video is a delivery format, not a computer storage format - and is
likely to be around much longer than DVD-Audio which will turn into a
curiosity - just like SQ, QS or CD-4 from the 70's. Does anyone have the
technology to play those discs nowadays? If you want something better than
CD that is widely playable then DVD video is the best way to go.

You might need some slightly more specialised burning
software to create the discs though.

This I want to avoid. At the moment to create DVD-Audio I can use a
couple of commands to create an image of the UDF file system, modify
and install the necessary files, and then burn the image using the
standard burner.


DVD video should be even simpler than DVD audio - there are plenty more
tools that support it so I'm not sure what the problem is. But then we
could be talking about completely different things. I'm not sure if what
you are calling DVD audio is really a standards compliant DVD-A disc or
just a DVD-ROM with audio files on it - there is a very big difference
between the two.

Cheers.

James.