$249 for the basic 'home' encoder and $1,495 for the full HD encoder isn't that expensive.
Not that any of my audio recordings are remotely good enough to justify that level of quality/expense and those that aren't too sad I just use PCM. I don't do surround and doubt I ever will, without a decent 5.1 monitoring studio I'd be pulling my pud thinking I could do it justice. Even from those that are blessed with them seem to get it wrong at times.

For what it's worth the big cinema chain down here seem to be ditching DTS. Too much messing around and the patrons don't seem to care. I'm just happy enough getting surround 'something' that I paid for, into the cinema. Wether it's DTS or Dolby I don't really care, when it drops back to the optical stereo track because the print is past its used bt date then I DO care.

Bob.

TSMuxer is great app for sure... I use it to (as you say) demux DTS (DTS-HD) streams - then use MeGui to transcode them to AC-3. Just would be nice if there was support in Vegas... but as it stands now I am guessing that it is not economically sound to do so.

You can certainly get stand alone DTS encoders from http://www.neyrinck.com/index.htmlNeyrink[/link]

They also do Dolby Digital and soon Dolby E amongst other things.

As for direct support for DTS in Vegas it gets down to the licensing cost for the encoder/decoder and the overall number of end users who'd want it.

My guess is that the inherent cost increase in the purchase price of Vegas is the main reason why you won't be seeing it included any time soon.

As for 5.1 mixes done in Vegas check out http:www.newhope.com.au/news.htmlDeath's Requiem[/link] which I mixed with Vegas in 5.1 though you'd need to get the DVD to hear the 5.1 mix.

New Hope Media

New Hope Media

Why exactly does it have to be IN Vegas anyway.
You can render a mutlitrack mix out of Vegas anyway complete with panning can't you?

Just take that into the encoder and let it do its thing.
That avoids adding the cost of the encoder into Vegas's sell price and the R&D cost of getting it to interface, something that the majority would understandably baulk at.

Bob.

I don't think we really need dts and true hd in the first place. Uncompressed pcm is just as good when going to blu ray. The unfortunate part is that DVDa does not support multi channel pcm.... and THIS is what we need.

Isn't multichannel PCM going to use up a large amount of the available bandwidth?

Even the lossless compression of SoFo's pca halves the bandwidth. Using pcm for surround sounds kind of daft to me. Keep in mind that most of the time most of the channels are carrying no data. With PCM they're still using the same amount of the available bandwidth that could be used for vision.

Bob.

"Isn't multichannel PCM going to use up a large amount of the available bandwidth?"

Absolutely true... but then I have yet to run into any serious space problems with BD.

It's not space that I'm so worried about, generally you want to encode at the highest data rate possible.
Two factors constrain that, space and the maximum bitrate the spec permits. Six channels of 16/48 PCM is going to eat up 4.5Mb/sec from the max bitrate. I don't have the figures for BD but for a SD DVD that's nearly half the available bitrate.

Bob.

I'm not talking dvd Bob. To go with multi channel pcm on a dvd would border on silliness... for a video disk anyway.

I've been trying to find some definite specs on PCM for bluray and of course it does support pcm. I have honestly yet to come across anything that positively states that BD will support MULTI channel pcm though. And I can't really experiment with it either. Of the burning aps that I have, none will actually burn 6 channel pcm (wav)... except for Adobe Audition... but that won't burn a video disk.

"I have honestly yet to come across anything that positively states that BD will support MULTI channel pcm though."

Here is a link to the http://www.blu-raydisc.com/en/Industry/Specifications/PublicSpecs.htmlPublic Specs[/link] for Blu-Ray Discs from the Blu-ray Disc Association.

As far as multi channel PCM it states it is capable of carrying up to 8 channels of 48KHz, 96KHz or 6 channels of 192Khz sample rate LPCM audio in 16, 20 or 24 bit samples.

Maximum data rate for the audio content is 27.648Mbps out of a total 54Mbps for the Blu-ray disc format.

http://www.newhope.com.auNew Hope Media[/link]

Well this is a GOOD thing. Thanks for the info Newhope. Now all we need is a DVDa upgrade to burn multichannel. I won't be holding my breath waiting! :)