Meridian Lossless Packing

Meridial Lossless Packing (MLP) is a lossless audio codec developed by the British pro-audio developer and manufacturer Meridian specially for inclusion in the DVD-Audio format. The same compression algorithm is applied in Dolby TrueHD on Blu-Ray discs.

It was released as a completely closed format, with no specification, and an expensive encoder (US$ 2500 as of October 2005). It has later been reverse-engineered, and decoding is now supported in ffmpeg (with an experimental encoder).

The original encoder was known to be slow, and inefficient on CD content (16 bit, 44100 Hz, stereo), being outperformed by Shorten and even RAR. MLP supports wasted bits - marketed as a "feature" for DVD manufacturers to decimate the promised 24 bits to e.g. 22 for compression to lower size. Tested on a DVD with such material (22 effective bits), it was beaten by every other codec that support wasted bits, including FLAC at its -0 setting.

External links

• meridian-support MLP Lossless Compression white-paper.
• Lossless Codec Comparison
• Martijn van Beurden's lossless comparison, revision 4 p. 19 for compression on 22-bit signal