Dolby Digital support for Audio engine?

[dicksan]

How would i go about implementing support for dolby digital technology in my PC game audio engine, is it possible? Do i need to anything to make 3D sound to work on dolby speaker systems..?:wacko:

cheers:ninja:

[TheNut]

I’m not entirely sure what you want to support. Do you want to encode/decode Dolby Digital audio (AC3) or do you want to playback 3D positional audio on a multi-speaker system?

Dolby Digital is an audio format. It doesn’t have a role in 3D positional audio, which can render audio anywhere in 3D space in real-time. Technologies such as Direct Sound can do this. For Dolby Digital playback, you need to write a decoder or use an existing one. I don’t know of any though.

[kitt3n]

The Miles Sound System 7.x supports dolby digital...
It's for commercial use though (few thousand bucks).

You might look into FMod though - it might support dd.

[dicksan]

I am aware of Miles and FMod, and i am making my own audio system. I want to allow the user to be able to switch between, stereo, headphones and 5.1 output.

What i meant in the question was; What do i need to do so that the 3D sound will play on a 5.1 speaker system, and how can i do this using directx or openAL.

thanks

[TheNut]

The DirectX SDK contains samples on how to use DirectSound as well as 3D Listeners and Buffers. You also don’t have to worry about how many speakers someone has. DirectX automatically determines this based on the user’s OS configuration and will properly output audio to the correct speakers. All you need to worry about is the point in 3D space for which the sound originates from and DirectSound will do the rest. Other things you can set in DirectSound include the min and maximum distance with rolloff, Doppler effect, and velocity.