Playing of DVD-audio only disks!

[peterp]

Got hold of a DVD-A (DVD Audio) disk.
Promptly discovered none of my stand-alone Blu-ray or DVD players would have anything at all to do with it.

However my imaging workstation was able to open and read the disk, VLC took off and played it but output only 2 channels.

So a hunt discovered freeware Foobar2000 and the dvda plugin for it.
http://www.foobar2000.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdadecoder/files/foo_input_dvda/

This correctly read the disk, decoded it to 4 channel (yea quadraphonic!) 24/96000 hidef sound, and sent it via a rather long 6 meter HDMI cable to my home theater system.

Fascinating, amount of work you have to do to play all the various formats that have come out.
Worth the effort though, Floyd at Pompeii sounded brilliant in the original quadraphonic discrete audio pulled from a 35mm film print this disk was supposedly made from.

Creating the dvd-a from the audio_ts files was another challenge, but Linux took care of that with the cdrtools package
http://dvd-audio.sourceforge.net/howto.shtml

(you only need the mkisofs with the patch so it understands the dvd-audio format to create the disk image, and cdrecord to burn it  from the cdrtools package)
I think they even have a windows version of those packages, for those afraid of trying Linux   .