CCTV employs Linear Acoustic Dolby Digital/Plus transcoder

Chinese Central Television (CCTV) has put the Linear Acoustic LA-5269 Dolby Digital/Plus transcoder on the air at its newly built "100 percent HD-ready" broadcast facilities in Beijing.

"The Linear Acoustic LA-5269 Dolby Digital/Plus transcoder plays a critical role in the MCR at CCTV's new facility," said Xu Gangming, director of CCTV's transmission department. "It has not only simplified the system structure, but also provides stable, high-performance 5.1-channel surround encoding for our HD channels. It fits the rigorous requirements of handling audio metadata and supporting the top quality program production and distribution we demand at CCTV."

The LA-5269 can encode, decode and transcode the most popular multichannel audio formats in use by television broadcasters. Metadata is supported via an RS485 connection and can be extracted from an applied HD- or SD-SDI signal. Dual redundant internal power supplies are standard; SNMP and Dolby E decoding are available options.

The ability to handle program metadata properly is a top priority for CCTV. Most CCTV programming relies on static metadata, but from time to time the ability to handle dynamic metadata is required. The LA-5269 handles both. The ability to accept SDI input, which simplifies workflow in the new plant, was also important to CCTV.