https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=122053.0 about E-AC3 but company's motives remained mostly same in last 25 years.. it seems Dolby wanted per-decoder license/fee, and got it... with literal 100s of millions of devices.. yeah, guess they can eat something not so cheap. not sure if any of this 3d audio will take off in near future, but at least hearing some broadcast from 202x might be important.. for historical reasons. On Tuesday, May 10, 2022, Andrew Randrianasulu <randrianasulu@gmail.com> wrote:
Probably not very relevant right now but apparently Dolby pushed their new ac4 codec as part of new digital TV standart..
so.. it might be encountered in new broadcasts.
ffmpeg decoder was already written, but not in any release or even main tree
see
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/8349
and last comment pointing at recent-ish rebase
https://github.com/makrsmark/FFmpeg/commits/ac4
if I understand correctly only mpeg transport stream currently supported as container, and not, say, mp4.