14 DAY TRIAL // Cyberlink and Realtek worked together on the faulty ALC889a premium HD sound codec, which did not feature full support for HD sound and used to downgrade it to DVD quality (48KHz/16-bit) instead. The result of the team work is an ALC889a HD audio codec (perhaps the ALC885 is included, too) which now supports full bit-rate 192KHz/24-bit sound.
Another team worker was Gigabyte, and the ALC889a is part of their exclusive agreement. All is nice and well as long as the ALC885 is included in the update, otherwise only users that own a Gigabyte motherboard would enjoy the new updates.
Cyberlink stated that the update would arrive this year, either in Q3 or Q4, and it would be just another HD audio codec in the multitude of already existing ones. We should take a note here that not all of them feature content protection support as the ALC889a/885 do.
"We see high-definition audio being the inevitable trend for matching up with HD video for delivering a true digital home entertainment," said Alice H. Chang, CEO of CyberLink, in a statement.
PowerDVD Ultra users should be happy, as they will be able to acquire the codec for free.
The press release gave no specific information whether the codec is via HDMI or LCPM, yet it does say that it works with Nvidia PureVideo, ATI Avivo, and Intel Clear Video technologies in order to provide "uncompressed content-protect[ed] audio".
The fact that no software capable of decoding HD movies can output the sound at the same quality was uncovered to developers around nine months ago. At that moment, there was no set specification that the software, hardware and OS could adhere to all, so the HDCP compliance could not simply be maintained between these three. This way, there was a need of a driver path for every sound codec supporting the feature in order to allow the software access this.
The fact that the problem was solved, even if it took a lot of time, is rather a good thing, although it might be too late, as most HD enthusiasts have probably purchased a set top box or PlayStation 3 to play those Blu-ray movies.