Where is Dolby E Used the Most?
Scope
As a format, Dolby E is sprinkled throughout the industry. In the western markets, the most prevalent being remote trucks and archival work. Dolby E can carry and maintain Dolby Digital metadata (DD being require for digital television delivery in The States), so trucks can prep and ingest content – and the metadata can instruct a downstream DD encoder on how to behave– prior to playout. There is also a lot of older content that lives on tape too. Archival departments are using our software solution in place of Dolby hardware, when laying back from VTR to Pro Tools, Media Composer, etc. Eastern markets jumped from mono to surround in a manner of months about 2 years ago, and Dolby E has been quite popular in their broadcast and post areas. There are other use cases, but these are the most prevalent.
Most of the spigots in the world are still 2-channel (Analog, AES, etc.), so mezzanine codes like Dolby E remain relevant. This goes away to some degree with AES67 and AOIP as a whole, but most of the world isn’t there yet, and there is a lot of content that exists in Dolby E and similar formats.
Dolby E is used in broadcast and post-production facilities to distribute multi-channel audio, six or eight channels, through a two-channel transport system. This occurs where there are equipment limitations, such as the number of tracks on a VTR for example, or where bandwidth requirements make multi-channel audio costs prohibitive such as with satellite capacity. Dolby E gets multi-channel audio to TV affiliate stations, so that they can transmit a multi-channel signal to consumers using Dolby Digital. Note that Dolby E audio never reaches the viewer at home. Like all DTV audio, it is decoded to PCM audio and then re-encoded into Dolby Digital just prior to transmission.
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