Hi there

I've just been wondering, in relation to the end of the format war, and the likely release of Transformers on Blu-Ray in the near future.

I'll start by stating clearly that I have the HD-DVD and whilst many lamented the lack of a lossless track, I have to admit that to me it probably sounds better than any other soundtrack on either format, whether lossy or lossless.

I'm just thinking that with the greater capacity and bandwidth of Blu-Ray, if Paramount choose to include a lossless track on Blu-Ray, how easy would it be for them to do this?

By this I mean, when creating the current 5.1 DD+ track, would the track have been mixed to create a lossless 5.1 PCM track, and the DD+ track created from this, such that a lossless 5.1 master already exists which could then just be used as it is in PCM form, or losslessly compressed using Dolby True-HD or DTS-HD-MA? Or would a new lossless soundmix have to be created again from scratch?

There is no such thing as a 'DTS' or "DD+" mix or "TrueHD" mix - the film's 6-track PCM digital master is simply fed into the DD+ or TrueHD or DTS-HD encoder. So releasing a soundtrack in any format is simple - they just encode it.