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Sadly I think that will never happen, because the majority of the public costumers don't uses lossless formats

Is it a matter of bandwidth and storage? Because if anyone were able to download a 400 MB download in 10 minutes, and store on a 500GB HD, it would be presumable people would drop MP3 in favor of FLAC.

Yeah, I wouldn't hold my breath for that one if I were you.


My only response to this is: do you live in the real world, or only on HA, lol? It's more than obvious for myriads of reasons why all of that, though ideal, is a really long way off.
- user/manufacturer ignorance
- lack user need (as perceived by the users themselves)
- lack of FLAC mainstream music releases
- cost of extra storage
- lack out out-of-box FLAC support in the 2 major media players (iTunes and WMP) and in the iTunes/iPod ecosystem
- increased complexity of FLAC encoding as opposed to easy default ripping in the above programs
... etc

Good idea, but really over the horizon.

Also, mp3 give you a 10-12x reduction in storage/bandwidth usage. More than enough to warrant a change in formats.

FLAC give you only a 2x redection in storage/bandwidth usage. I think for many users, that number is small enough that they simply choose to use raw pcm if a change in format cause any pain, change of equipment etc.


Now, the best chance would be if FLAC was actually standardised, like Meridians MLP is in DVD-A.

To me, ReplayGain is a lot more important, and I am hoping for some EU-law making RG mandatory, at the very least to avoid teen hearing loss from iPods :-)

-k

It's more likely that they will ban all the portable players to "protect our ears" than that. Considering the fact that RG is a free iniciative and there's no big corporation behind that i'm sure the decision makers will never hear about it. Sadly, it doesn't matter who's the best, but who has the biggest lobby.

Regarding FLAC, i'm also sure that there won't be any support out of the box. But i'm hoping that home players will once reach the level when user firmware upgrades will be possible, similar to Rockbox. That would solve our problems.

So maybe (but also in the future) something like MP4-ALS might become standard. I think Dolby True HD (which is infact MLP based) or DTS-HD (Master Audio Suite) will become standard on the Blue-disk players. But the encoders have big price tags

The good thing is Lossless is Lossless whatever the codec.

i respectfully (to Flac) disagree.. don't get them to support flac, get them to support TAK

more like three minutes (here anyway) actually.. though admittedly not everyone has 100mbit yet :/
still, it can't be that far off

Thats why you have volume control.

Anyways sadly FLAC has one huge enormous flaw (according to the big companies)....no DRM. That's why sadly it will never get support. This in the consumers book is a huge plus however.

is there any dvd player that can at least reproduce WAV from an ISO layer?

It would be very simple to wrap FLAC in any (custom) container with DRM.

I think that only by combining the data from ReplayGain (or some similar loudness estimator) with the bundled headphones sensitivity is it possible to somewhat accurately limit the outputlevel to one that is "loud enough" without being harming.

Of course, people with "audiophile" headphones will complain that their headphones are lower sensitivity and therefore the level is to low, but then those people will always find a "hack" to disable this kind of thing.

The important thing for me is that this will render all songs at the same perceived maximum volume (if the users cranks it all up), meaning that "level maximisers" could be rendered useless :-D

-k

apple could wrap FLAC in fairplay just as easily as with AAC. DRM is a function of the container not the codec.

anyway I don't think DRM is going to last. eventually the last of the dinosaurs running the show now will die off and a practical business model will emerge that doesn't involve creating artificial scarcity with a police state.


why? there are already several dvd players that can play FLAC.

Josh

(edit: typo)

What DVD players can play FLAC?

Have a look at the "Home Stereo:" section on http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware, e.g. this one seems to be really interesting.

zensonic z500, ziova cs505/cs510, various escient fireball players, maybe the imuse and mediaready MC (see the hardware link Junon posted). the only one of those I have is the z500 which I've tested and it does play FLAC off dvd. I think the ziovas are the next generation of that.

how much does this one cost, and why is it sold by only 2 places in the world... :-(

I just found out that Helios X3000 and X5000 plays FLAC and they don't have HDD (thanks god). Although I read at the Helios forums there are problems with playing FLAC there.
Bit they indeed looks professionally. Especially the X5000 looks nice but it's quiet expensive.