Why no FLAC support on recent Blu-Ray devices? Options

[krafty]

I've been watching recent releases of Blu-Ray players and most of them just ignore lossless formats like FLAC, WavPack and so on.
They ship with MP3 and some are shipping with AAC support, but FLAC is a dream...

Any logic reason besides contractual ties with proprietary formats?

[saratoga]

No these devices generally do not have hardware assistance for audio codecs since they only use a few 10s of MHz at most, and also since decoding audio is fairly branchy and complicated, which makes it very costly to do completely in hardware. Usually even "dedicated" mp3 decoder ICs are really just SRAM and a very simple DSP core with an mp3 decoder burned into an embedded ROM.

Usually when you look at a datasheet and they say that a system supports mp3, wma or AAC what they mean is that the SDK comes with decoders already implemented and (if you so choose) you can license those decoders (or just use your own). If you dump a lot of these device firmwares, you can see that the codecs are actually compiled with different compiler versions then the rest of the OS, since they don't even bother licensing the source, just the compiled binaries. In the case of Apple though, they used all their own decoders anyway, since they're a huge company and can afford to develop their software in-house.