San Francisco – Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment and Anchor Bay Entertainment have become the latest Hollywood studios to adopt Dolby Digital Plus as their surround-sound format for movies and TV programs encoded in the UltraViolet Common File Format (CFF).
In January, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment announced their adoption of Dolby Digital Plus for their downloadable CFF content. Digital entertainment services such as CinemaNow, Target Ticket, and VUDU will deliver UltraViolet CFF-encoded TV shows and movies in Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby said.
The “consumer launch of CFF approaches, and encoding has started,” said Mark Teitell, GM of the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) alliance. DECE designed and built the UltraViolet service and operates it.
UltraViolet technology was developed to let consumers stream or download purchased video content to multiple devices, including TVs, personal computers, tablets, and mobile phones. UltraViolet movies and TV shows are already available for streaming to devices, but the launch of downloadable CFF-based UltraViolet titles by multiple studios will enable users to view their UltraViolet content without an Internet connection.
CFF titles will also enable consumers to move or copy an UltraViolet movie or TV show from one device to another, such as from PCs to tablets and smartphones. That will make it unnecessary to download a movie or TV show multiple times to multiple devices, as is the case with the current selection of downloadable UltraViolet movies.
CFF also mandates the use of two-channel AAC stereo on UltraViolet titles because of AAC’s widespread use in mobile devices.
