[Ian Montgomerie]

 http://www.eetimes.com/sys/news/OEG20020524S0091


The article forgot to mention another set of royalties that Chinese manufacturers aren't playing, IIRC it costs about 6 dollars per player for DTS (there is a royalty per channel of audio). Which is why a lot of cheap Chinese imports now have DTS.

 

[JeffDM]

You are saying that many of the Chinese companies aren't paying for the rights to use DTS either?


I didn't know that DTS itself was so expensive to licence. What is the cost just for DTS digital out?

 

[sspears]

Jeff, if you want to build a DVD player, it is going to cost you a lot of money up front just to build a single player. (>$100k and this is just for specs and license fees.) I have the info some where, but the worst offender is Macrovsion. The annual fee is madness! They also have a fee for 480i and another fee for 480p.

 

[Ian Montgomerie]

Digital output itself doesn't cost anything as long as it is encoded output. The cost is per channel of decoded (i.e. analog) output.

 

[hob]

Completly off topic:


How do the Chinese get drunk in Taiwon, they just Tai Won On. I couldn't help it I just made it up. lol

 

[JeffDM]

Quote:

Originally posted by sspears Jeff, if you want to build a DVD player, it is going to cost you a lot of money up front just to build a single player. (>$100k and this is just for specs and license fees.) I have the info some where, but the worst offender is Macrovsion. The annual fee is madness! They also have a fee for 480i and another fee for 480p.

I didn't know the specs & licences costed so much up front, I thought they were in the $10k range, but I guess it was just a subset that I was looking at.


I didn't know that a licence fee for Macrovision was charged for putting the signal generator into the chip. Based on what some sites said, I was under the impression that it was free for the player manufacturers to put in and they only got their money on per-disc charges.


The licencing for all this crap does look insane, given the costs up front and the residuals, I'm not surprised the Chinese companies try to duck them so aggressively.

 

[sspears]

macrovision gets an initial fee, annual fee, and per output type fee. This is on the hardware side, I don't know how it works on the software side.


I believe DTS does charge to pass their bitsream out. (or maybe it is just the logo on the front panel) I will have to dig up the doc and take a look.