Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Xbox HD-DVD comes at a heavy price?

Collapse
X
Collapse
 
  • Page of 14
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts
Previous 1 2 3 4 5 11 14 template Next
  • #1

    Xbox HD-DVD comes at a heavy price?

    An interesting post appeared on the official Xbox Team blog as the week fizzled out, concerning the amount of development the team endured to ensure HD-DVD drive compatibility with the Xbox 360.

    The add-on drive has apparently meant a staggering 4.7 million lines of code have been added to the 360's OS in an attempt to bring the Microsoft backed HD-DVD standard to the Xbox. This software-update driving the Xbox's HD-DVD implementation apparently utitlises the full 'six hardware threads' of the triple core CPU, and is claimed to push the system harder than any game currently available, ensuring for some considerable fan noise one would imagine.

    It's also cost Microsoft 'millions of dollars' to add. Lets hope it's all worth it and Xbox fans don't end up with the runner-up in the re-run of the VHS/Betamax war.

    The HD-DVD software was included within the fall system update which was released for download last Tuesday on Xbox Live. Immediately problems with the update were reported, with some users claiming the upgrade had bricked their consoles. Microsoft quickly responded acknowledging and admitting to the problems, and released a further update to resolve the issues, but not before around 1% of the installed base was infected.

    A big plus for Xbox 360 users once the issues were fixed was the inclusion of 1080p support, something that Sony have been purporting as the PS3's major advantage over the Xbox.
    I don't fancy watching movies with a hair drier working... At least the PS3 will be silent.

    Gembly - Page not found!
    http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35551
    Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy – Lessing
    Tags: None
  • #2
    Err. WTF?

    The HD-DVD has been demoed live and it's as noisy as the 360 is at the Dashboard according to everyone who has seen it.

    Don't be a douche and link to The Inquirer's interpretation of a blog post, just link to the blog post...

    Xbox Engineering
    http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2006/11/03/emergence-day.aspx


    What takes 4.7 million lines of code, partner teams from all over Microsoft, and millions of dollars to create? The Xbox 360 system software? Nope. This is just the HD DVD player.

    The Xbox platform team (us) is experiencing its own emergence day as of late; we've been hard at work for the past 8 months straight bringing the fall system update to fruition. I haven't even posted since August. Daryl's already gone over a lot of the features and changes that are in this release. I've personally been working on the Xbox 360 HD DVD player (which, by the way, reached the #1 best seller slot on Amazon.com's video games category) and I thought I'd go over some of the technical difficulties it takes to bring HD DVD to market.

    There's a perception that HD DVD is just DVD with HD content, but once you look at things more closely, it's clear that HD DVD is a different beast altogether. The Xbox platform team became serious about HD DVD last year, when Microsoft as a company threw its endorsement behind the standard.

    The Xbox 360 HD DVD Player, for the most part, is an entirely software based implementation. Other players on the market have specialized chips (called DSPs) that decode things like H.264, MPEG, VC1, DTS, Dolby Digital, and other codecs. Much like how backwards compatibility for Xbox 1 works on Xbox 360, the heavy parts of HD DVD are all done on Xbox 360's triple-core CPU.

    If DVD is an audio/video pipeline with some navigation data (go to the menu, start playing, etc.), HD DVD can be considered a runtime environment where audio/video playback is just one major feature. So let's break down that 4.7 million lines of code. I don't have the numbers for each component, but each of these is a very significant chunk:

    * Video Codecs: H.264, MPEG-2, VC1
    * Audio Codecs: Dolby Digital+, DTS, TrueHD, LPCM, MPEG
    * HDi: The HD DVD runtime engine.
    * GDI: Drawing stuff like menus
    * AACS: Cryptography/DRM stuff
    * MF: Audio/Video pipeline

    That's a lot of stuff. Some of the acronyms may not be recognizable. GDI is the Graphics Device Interface, which has been a mainstay of the Windows operating system for many years, providing facilities to draw stuff on screens. MF is Media Foundation - a framework for audio/video pipelines that was being built for Windows Vista. The Windows teams in charge of the above components all pitched in to make them work on Xbox 360 while continuing to work on other Windows projects (Vista, CE, etc.) - quite a task.

    A lot of the codecs existed in code at Microsoft before the Xbox 360 HD DVD Player was being built. However, it was all code that was optimized for PC platforms (windows/x86) and not Xbox 360's PPC core. This meant doing a lot of optimization. In this regard, the Xbox 360 implementation of H.264 can be considered a crowning achievement. For this computationally expensive codec, a hybrid approach was taken. Since GPUs are very good at parallelized workloads, stuff that could be parallelized is computed there, while the stuff that can't is better suited to the CPU and is done there.

    Unlike DVD, where typical players pass the audio data from the disc through to your receiver, HD DVD requires that players mix sounds from menus and such in with the audio being played for the movie. The 360 player software decodes all the above codecs in software, mixes anything that needs to go together, re-encodes it into Dolby Digital and then sends that to your receiver. So, don't be alarmed when your receiver still says "Dolby Digital" even if you've selected DTS in the menus.

    All 6 of Xbox 360's hardware threads are hard at work while playing back an HD DVD. At the moment, the player software pushes Xbox 360 harder than any other (save, perhaps, Gears of War during some particularly busy parts of the game).

    If I'd have known how much work it was going to be bringing the 360 HD DVD Player out this year, I may not have signed up last year, but now that I can watch HD movies, it's hard to go back to crummy old DVD
    "The issue is there are still many people out there that use religion as a crutch for bigotry and hate. Like Ben."
    Ben Kenobi: "That means I'm doing something right. "

    Comment

    • #3
      In related news:

      Microsoft's Xbox Live Video: HDTV and HD movie downloads for your 360

      This may sound a bit familiar to those paying close attention, but on November 22nd -- the year anniversary for the Xbox 360 -- Microsoft is announcing something fairly momentus, not for the gaming community, but for the CE industry. The Xbox 360, along with Akimbo, will be among the first mass-market devices able to download high def television programs -- and the first we know of in the states able to download HD movies. The service is called Xbox Live Video, and the fall update enables customers to spend their Microsoft points on standard and HD television from CBS, MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, Turner, and UFC, as well as HD movies from Warner Bros., Paramount, and so on. We're still a little in shock, ourselves, that Microsoft was able to in one fell swoop hit TiVo, Apple, Netflix, and a handful of others, but looking at Live over the last year, the move isn't that massively surprising. Of course, not even the vision of on-demand HD movies and TV downloads in six million homes at the flick of a switch could be without its variety of niggling concerns; being that we all know the devil's in the details, click on to get the particulars of the service.

      * Microsoft has not yet disclosed pricing for downloads, but it will be in Microsoft points.
      * Movies will be "rental" only, TV for "purchase" only.
      * At launch there will be over 800 hours of SDTV, and 200 hours of HDTV.
      * Neither TV nor movies are streamed; they are only downloaded, although you can stream short preview clips from the Live interface.
      * You can only download content to your Xbox 360 drive -- not to an external drive.
      * Your "purchased" TV programs can be downloaded an infinite amount of times to an infinite amount of consoles; you may also play them back on friends' 360s with your removable drive.
      * Deleted TV shows can be re-downloaded later; HDTV shows can be re-downloaded in either HDTV or SD.
      * Movies can be watched an unlimited number of times the first 24 hours. Plays after that period will cost the same as the initial download, although the movie data isn't necessarily deleted. You can keep the movie data on your drive up to 14 days without re-downloading it.
      * Downloads are in VC-1 (aka WMVHD) at 720p, 6.8Mbps video with 5.1 surround.
      * An average HD movie download should be between 4-5GB, and a two hour SD movie would be 1.6GB.
      * An average 1 hour (44 min) HDTV download should be about 2.2GB, and an average 1/2 hour (22 min) HDTV download should be about 1GB. A 1 hour SDTV download should be about 600MB, and a 1/2 hour SDTV download should be about 300MB.
      * This service will not be available for MSN TV users, Vongo subscribers, or any other Microsoft partners. It is Xbox Live only.
      * You cannot download programs through the Xbox Live web interface -- they can only be transported to your 360's removable drive.
      * There aren't any drive announcements being made, so if your puny 20GB Xbox drive is near or at capacity, you're out of luck, kid.

      Launch titles

      * Aqua Teen Hunger Force
      * Avatar: The Last Airbender
      * Batman Forever
      * Breaking Bonaduce
      * Carpocalypse
      * Chappelle's Show
      * CSI
      * Hogan Knows Best
      * Jackass: The Movie
      * Jericho
      * The Matrix
      * M:i:III
      * Nacho Libre
      * Nicktoons Network Animation Festival
      * Numb3rs
      * Pimp My Ride
      * Race Rewind (NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series races)
      * Raising the Roofs
      * The Real World
      * Robot Chicken
      * Skyland
      * South Park
      * SpongeBob SquarePants
      * Star Trek (original)
      * Superman Returns
      * 50 fights from Ultimate Fighting Championship, and some episodes from The Ultimate Fighter
      "The issue is there are still many people out there that use religion as a crutch for bigotry and hate. Like Ben."
      Ben Kenobi: "That means I'm doing something right. "

      Comment

      • #4
        For future reference, the majority of the noise on the 360 stems from the 12x DVD drive.

        The HD-DVD drive physically spins much slower, 12 rotations per second instead -- it's very, very quiet.
        "The issue is there are still many people out there that use religion as a crutch for bigotry and hate. Like Ben."
        Ben Kenobi: "That means I'm doing something right. "

        Comment

        • #5
          The last item is why M$ shouldn't have nickled and dimed the customers on hard drive space. Should have made the hard drive standard and something like 100 GBs. It would have given them a better opportunity to sell content.

          As for the Inquirer's interpretation of the blog post, I agree with... wtf?
          I came upon a barroom full of bad Salon pictures in which men with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a counter. It was the institution of the "free lunch" I had struck. You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt. Remember this if ever you are stranded in these parts. ~ Rudyard Kipling, 1891

          Comment

          • #6
            All 6 of Xbox 360's hardware threads are hard at work while playing back an HD DVD. At the moment, the player software pushes Xbox 360 harder than any other (save, perhaps, Gears of War during some particularly busy parts of the game).
            You said yourself that the 360 was noisy while playing games. If the player software pushes the 360 harder than any other game, shouldn't it be noisy? Unless there's something I missed...

            Edit: missed your last post about the DVD
            Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy – Lessing

            Comment

            • #7
              Think about it like installing a game on your computer.

              When the DVD-ROM in your computer spins fast, is your computer noisy? It's the same thing as the 360 in games, and it shouldn't be incredibly noisy during HD-DVDs (which run at the same speed/low rpm as the quiet bluray drives).
              "The issue is there are still many people out there that use religion as a crutch for bigotry and hate. Like Ben."
              Ben Kenobi: "That means I'm doing something right. "

              Comment

              • #8
                RE: Movies/TV Shows on Xbox 360

                I agree with DanS on hard drive space limitations. I've got 78GB of TV shows (all legally acquired, of course ) and 8 GB of movies - and these are not HD quality..even classifying them as "SD" would be a stretch for some. Now, 360 is all about the full HD experience, so I'm looking at 4-5GB per HD-quality movie? 2GB per TV episode? Of course you could opt for the SD-quality, which would be fine for a lot, if not most Xbox users, but that is still a big chunk - 1.6GB for a movie, and 600MB for a TV show. The 360 HD is gonna fill up pretty quick.

                Or will we see new HDs in the future, especially for this reason?

                Comment

                • #9
                  Obviously 20GB is very inadequate for such a purpose.

                  My 160GB DVR is small enough...
                  "The issue is there are still many people out there that use religion as a crutch for bigotry and hate. Like Ben."
                  Ben Kenobi: "That means I'm doing something right. "

                  Comment

                  • #10
                    They expect you to buy lots and lots of hard drives

                    100 GB wouldn't even be enough for HD movies. It would fill up pretty fast. I'm sure Microsoft will come up with something, though. Right now, I have about 30 GB of movies and 130 GB of music.
                    Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy – Lessing

                    Comment

                    • #11
                      Originally posted by nostromo
                      They expect you to buy lots and lots of hard drives

                      100 GB wouldn't even be enough for HD movies. It would fill up pretty fast. I'm sure Microsoft will come up with something, though.
                      Movies only stay on the drive for 2 weeks -- they are rentals.
                      "The issue is there are still many people out there that use religion as a crutch for bigotry and hate. Like Ben."
                      Ben Kenobi: "That means I'm doing something right. "

                      Comment

                      • #12
                        VC1 is a good codec -- both for downloads and HD-DVD. 4-5 GB per downloaded movie might surprise you with quality, although HD-DVD would of course be better for those with very large screens.

                        Rather, it doesn't seem credible to me that people with a 20 GB drive will be able to download and store more than 1 movie at a time, what with all the other stuff that they've downloaded for games and the like.
                        I came upon a barroom full of bad Salon pictures in which men with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a counter. It was the institution of the "free lunch" I had struck. You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt. Remember this if ever you are stranded in these parts. ~ Rudyard Kipling, 1891

                        Comment

                        • #13
                          At a press event last night, at least one 360 had a 70GB+ drive (I think 80GB, 'cause 10GB is reserved for the console):



                          Also, the retail box:


                          And screenshots of the Movie download service:










                          And TV:








                          "The issue is there are still many people out there that use religion as a crutch for bigotry and hate. Like Ben."
                          Ben Kenobi: "That means I'm doing something right. "

                          Comment

                          • #14
                            Originally posted by DanS
                            The last item is why M$ shouldn't have nickled and dimed the customers on hard drive space. Should have made the hard drive standard and something like 100 GBs. It would have given them a better opportunity to sell content.
                            QFT. It seemed like such a big mistake from the beginning.

                            Comment

                            • #15
                              Today is a big day for Xbox 360 games.

                              Gears of War and Call of Duty 3 both come out, among other games.

                              Gears of War, in particular, is apparently a system seller.

                              Scores so far:

                              Gamespot: 9.6/10

                              IGN: 9.4/10

                              1up: 10/10

                              TeamXbox: 9.6/10

                              Gears of War discussion: http://www.apolyton.net/forums/showt...hreadid=159272
                              "The issue is there are still many people out there that use religion as a crutch for bigotry and hate. Like Ben."
                              Ben Kenobi: "That means I'm doing something right. "

                              Comment

                              Previous 1 2 3 4 5 11 14 template Next
                              Working...
                              X