Video Asylum

Posted by neil97232 (A) on March 10, 2004 at 21:36:01

I have several Sony DVD players bought a few years ago, on which when you select display, and bit rate, they show video bit rate as a linear graph in Mbps, as well as the audio bit rate in kbps.

So I instantly can see that the audio portion is 192kbps, 320 kbps, or whatever. The audio bit rate does seem to correlate often to overall sound quality.

Recently, I bought a new Toshiba 3950, and while it's a great player for the price, I notice there is no seperate audio bit rate indicator, just a single indication in Mbps, about which Toshiba's owner's manual states "Amount of picture, sound and subtitle data the DVD video disc transferred per second...." Trouble is, this doesn't tell you anything about the audio data on the disc, nor about encoding bit rate differences on alternate audio tracks.

Can anyone comment on whether current mass-market DVD players, or higher-end models, are retaining audio bit rate indication?

Many thanks,
Neil L.