Just two days ago Alexander E. Patrakov uploaded first version of a working free DTS Coherent Acoustics encoder to Gitorious. The project is called dtsenc and additionally features an ALSA plug-in.

We asked Alexander about status of the project and his further plans. Currently the encoder supports a very basic feature set of the core DTS specification. There is a plan to implement support for additional Xch streams to support 7.1 at some point in the future, but not much beyond that.

Support for various popular extensions of DTS such as DTS-HD Master Audio is currently impossible due to lack of open specifications on them. Not even FFmpeg can read and decode all of DTS-HD. Apart from that, DTS Inc. is already quite unhappy about free DTS decoders.

As for dtsenc, Alexander is interested in a wider testing of the ALSA plug-in which is a prerequisite for the first official public release.