The Unofficial DVD-Audio Specification

Overview

These pages contain a description of the contents of the AUDIO_TS directory on a DVD-Audio disk. The official specifications are not publically available and no reference has been made to them during the writing of this documentation. All information has been gained from the examination of the content of DVD-Audio disks produced by commercial authoring software.

At the moment these pages are little more than rough notes and hypotheses, but information is being added constantly.

The contents of the DVD-Audio "zone" (i.e. the AUDIO_TS directory) consists of the following elements:

• Simple Audio Manager (SAMG) - this is stored in the AUDIO_PP.IFO file and is the equivalent of the table of contents on a Red Book audio CD.
• Audio Manager (AMG) - this is stored in the AUDIO_TS.* files and consists of the AUDIO_TS.IFO file, an optional moving or still video menu in the AUDIO_TS.VOB file and the backup file AUDIO_TS.BUP.
• Audio Still Video Set (ASVS) - this is stored in the AUDIO_SV.* files and is an optional part of the specification.
• Audio Objects (AOBs) - these files contain the actual audio data - either uncompressed LPCM or MLP-encoded "packed PCM" (PPCM).

In addition, if the disk is copy-protected using CPPM, two additional files called DVDAUDIO.MKB and DVDAUDIO.BUP are present in the AUDIO_TS directory.

Next: AOB files

Last Modified: Friday, 21-Sep-2007 19:14:34 UTC