I have a HK DVD-50 that supports MP3 connected to a 1050. I have found that most MP3s play fine through a digital optical connection, but some MP3 bit rates (or something, I haven't quite picked up the pattern) only play via the analog connection.

On a related note, I thought that Dolby Digital sound tracks as found on DVDs ARE just MP3 (MP3 being as shortening for MPEG3). If this is so, it would seem minor for any DVD player or AV receiver to support MP3. Maybe I'm all wet...

Some AV receivers that state that they support MP3 decoding will have a USB port somewhere on the unit that you can use to send encoded MP3 data into the receiver. I don't know if they'll accept MP3 data on an SPDIF input or not, or if there is any way to send MP3 data over an SPDIF input.

As far as I know, Dolby Digital encoding is NOT the same as MP3. MP3 is also not short for MPEG3, it's short for MPEG2 audio layer 3.

MPEG based audio encoding was considered for DVD, but was dropped in favor of DD. I don't know why. I think some foreign PAL discs may use MPEG audio encoding, but I'm not sure about that one.

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Matthew J. Hill
matt@idsi.net