company and all of its intellectual property. Microsoft discontinued the official HDCD website in 2005. In January 2007, there were roughly the same number of titles available on SACD as on HDCD-encoded CDs. Hardware players A number of manufacturers offer players with HDCD capability. Some Panasonic DVD players and the Oppo line of players all feature HDCD decoding. Several Yamaha Blu-ray players as well as Emotiva CD players decode HDCD. Software players Windows Media Player Since version 9 of Microsoft's Windows Media Player (WMP) HDCD enabled CDs can be played on personal computers fitted with a 24-bit sound card. With some HDCD discs and some DVD players using WMP, the first track may not be recognized as HDCD, but all subsequent tracks are. This is because HDCD has a control signal, and if the signal is not detected by WMP at the beginning of the song, the HDCD decoder is not activated. Other software In 2007, a member of the Doom9 forum authored a Windows CLI utility, hdcd.exe, to extract and decode the HDCD data in 16-bit WAV files ripped from HDCD discs. This utility writes 24-bit WAV output files with four bits of padding per sample. The author of the utility decided not to make the source code publicly available as the HDCD technology is patented. Illustrate's dBpoweramp Music Converter, a Windows GUI program, has an HDCD DSP effect that acts as a front-end to the utility listed above. A plugin is available for foobar2000 that will decode HDCD data in any 16-bit PCM passed through it, resulting in a 20-bit PCM stream. FFmpeg's libavfilter includes an HDCD filter as of FFmpeg 3.1 (June 2016) that will convert 16-bit PCM with HDCD data to 20-bit PCM. An open-source HDCD decoder library exists as libhdcd. See also DualDisc DVD-Audio Extended Resolution Compact Disc (XRCD) Super Audio CD (SACD) Super Bit Mapping (SBM) References External links High Definition Compatible Digital at HydrogenAudio wiki Compact disc 120 mm discs Windows media players Microsoft Windows multimedia technology Computer-related introductions in 1995 Audiovisual introductions in 1995