Are All Blu-ray Drives the Same?
While the Rainier includes full onboard decoding of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio for the built-in Blu-ray player, it only does so at higher resolutions via the eight-channel analog outputs. The HDMI output automatically limits all audio streams to linear PCM with a maximum 7.1-channel sampling rate of 48 kilohertz. (The vast majority of movie soundtracks are mastered at 48 kHz, but some lossless content on Blu-ray is encoded at higher sample rates.) If you prefer, you can transmit the lossy, backward-compatible Dolby Digital or DTS core bitstreams via HDMI directly to your AVR. You might ask why a $299 Blu-ray player can transmit full-resolution lossless bit-streams over HDMI and the $5,499 Niveus cannot. It’s because a Blu-ray player is part of a closed system that can’t record or copy content that can be distributed over the Internet. Since media servers use an open environment on a PC platform, content providers are extremely explicit about their restrictions for trans-missi
