Plan to use your Xbox 360 for watching DVD's? Here's an advice: don't.

[Nostromo]

According to Extremetech, the 360 is a crappy DVD player.

Frankly, the Xbox 360 is a terrible DVD player. Yeah, we know it's primarily a game console. We know DVD movie playback is essentially a "free" feature. But it is a feature nonetheless, and an important one. After all, many of our TVs only have so many inputs, and we only have so much room for boxes in our TV cabinets or stands. If you have an Xbox 360, you have no reason to believe that you shouldn't be able to use it as your primary DVD player. Except that you can't, because it's awful. Honestly, we have seen sub-$100 DVD players and PC graphics cards perform better than this. Don't believe us? Think the 360 plays back DVDs "fine?" We've got proof!

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2088531,00.asp

[Asher]

This strikes me as incredibly surprising, seeing as I've watched many dozens of movies on the 360 (upscaling to 1080p on my 42" screen). I've noticed none of these problems, and in fact friends frequently comment on the fantastic picture quality over DVDs they're used to...

[Asher]

This is also at odds with the test results of people who actually know what they're doing, not some ExtremeTech monkey:

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/cgi-bin/shootout.cgi?function=search&articles=all&type=&manufacturer=31&maxprice=0&deInt=0&mpeg=0#MicrosoftXbox%20360%20HD%20DVD%20Add-On

[Asher]

It's also interesting that they picked DVDs with known problems in their encoding to test, eg http://dvd.ign.com/articles/451/451201p1.html

Is this guy working for Sony or something?

See this thread: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=797907

[MarkG]

perfect job, nostromo. juuuuuuust perfect!

[Elok]

Yeah, that was pretty good. You may have delayed his next "PS3/Wii sales are down in Liechtenstein, Sony/Nintendo is DOOMED" thread by as much as twenty minutes.

[Asher]

Originally posted by MarkG
perfect job, nostromo. juuuuuuust perfect!

I'm honoured that you've adopted this mission to "troll" me by posting stupid **** repeatedly.

[Nostromo]

I checked the AVS forums before posting this, just to get a second opinion, but I didn't find anything.

Maybe Microsoft doesn't use the same DVD drive for every 360? I know they used 2 or 3 different drives for the original Xbox. Some people had problems with certain drives, the Thompson drives, IIRC. I know that the DVD drive in my Xbox was crappy, compared to my cheap Toshiba DVD player.

[Asher]

This has nothing to do with the DVD drives, though. The bits are coming off the same way.

A lot of it has to do with the cabling used, the TV set, etc.

For instance the aliasing problem he states I could never tell because I'm not watching it at 720x480, but 1920x1080...

And a lot of his problems come from improperly encoded discs which the 360 didn't handle correctly, but the some players do...

It's sensational crap by an author who has no idea what he's talking about on a site that's desperate to fix their downward slide in viewers.

[Nostromo]

I've watched many dozens of movies on the 360 (upscaling to 1080p on my 42" screen)

I'm not watching it at 720x480, but 1920x1080...

You don't have to rub it in, you know...

[Asher]

It's a key point.

He chose not to utilize image improvement capabilities of the 360 in an imagequality test. Why, I've no idea.

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by Elok
Yeah, that was pretty good. You may have delayed his next "PS3/Wii sales are down in Liechtenstein, Sony/Nintendo is DOOMED" thread by as much as twenty minutes.