Xbox HD-DVD comes at a heavy price? - DiscussWorldIssues - Socio-Economic Religion and Political Uncensored Debate

**Feelundseenna** · 11-07-2006, 07:13 AM

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...

http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archi...gence-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

**soipguibbom** · 11-07-2006, 07:24 AM

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.

**nebrarlepleme** · 11-07-2006, 07:30 AM

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

**Loonerisav** · 11-07-2006, 07:38 AM

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?

**lierro** · 11-07-2006, 07:54 AM

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.

**Charryith** · 11-07-2006, 07:54 AM

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.

**inhitoemits** · 11-07-2006, 04:12 PM

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.

**rootoronpunty** · 11-07-2006, 05:17 PM

Hmpff.. they should come up with their pricing policy soon. I am afraid that these downloads will be grossly overpriced if you take it into account that you can't even keep these. It should be the standard price of any rental. Not even close to the actual product sold on DVDs etc.

But if the pricing is OK, this will definitely will be a COOL thing.

Now, PS3 is truly screwed up.. they were before, now they are even more so.

**tpJKhY8Z** · 11-08-2006, 05:45 AM

$4 USD

**XqrkN4a0** · 11-08-2006, 05:52 AM

320 points is 3.84 Euros

http://www.gangsterpanda.com/mspc.php

**pXss8cyx** · 11-08-2006, 05:58 AM

Do you need the add-on drive to download the movies?

**Virosponna** · 11-08-2006, 06:01 AM

Or maybe that was if you want to use your friend's xbox..

**Rqvtwlfk** · 11-08-2006, 06:04 AM

oh man that's true... ouch.

**Kryfamid** · 11-08-2006, 08:53 AM

I didn't say I wanted one, but the thing has some qualities.

What makes you so sure Blueray will fail? Granted, it got on a rough start, but things could pick up. Or it could go the way of Betamax. Or HD-DVD and Bluray could both go the way of SACD and DVD-audio.

**pushokalex1** · 11-08-2006, 05:46 PM

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Do you need the add-on drive to download the movies? Yes. These are not streaming movies, but downloaded movies. So you would need a hard drive to store the movie before watching.

**CAxrrAYN** · 11-08-2006, 06:07 PM

Got my HD-DVD today...as suspected, it's really, really quiet when playing -- just like the 360 is when playing DVDs.

Have I mentioned it's really pretty?

The menus are much faster than DVDs too.

**Ornamiviant** · 11-14-2006, 06:52 AM

Originally posted by laurentius
I'm getting really excited about PS3. Xbox360 is starting to look more and more inferior to it. The blu-ray movies look absolutely stunning from 50 inch 1080p flat tv.

I don't understand this.

Bluray and HD-DVD quality is more or less a wash, perhaps leaning a bit in favour of HD-DVD.

And there's not a game on the PS3 that can come close to touching Gears of War.

I'm not sure why the 360 is looking inferior?

**andrekuper** · 11-14-2006, 07:02 AM

Btw Asher have you ever seen a blu-ray movie from a large true HD TV?

They look very very impressive.

**cepAceryTem** · 11-14-2006, 07:08 AM

Originally posted by laurentius
Btw Asher have you ever seen a blu-ray movie from a large true HD TV?

They look very very impressive. Yes.

I'm also well aware that most Bluray movies use crap MPEG2 encoding and look worse than their HD-DVD counterpart.

I'm also an owner of a 1080p "true HD" (that's marketing BS, by the way) big screen TV and I enjoy my HD-DVD movies on it.

You sound like an annoying Sony marketbot with your blatant lies (no 1080p! TRUE HD! XBOX ISNT TRUE HD!!!) and general ignorance...

**DiatryDal** · 11-14-2006, 07:12 AM

bite me

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Or did you already

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
good night

11-07-2006, 07:13 AM	#1
Feelundseenna Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 457 Senior Member	Xbox HD-DVD comes at a heavy price? 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... http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archi...gence-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 Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-07-2006, 07:24 AM	#2
soipguibbom Join Date Nov 2005 Posts 542 Senior Member	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. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-07-2006, 07:30 AM	#3
nebrarlepleme Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 549 Senior Member	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 Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-07-2006, 07:38 AM	#4
Loonerisav Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 568 Senior Member	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? Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-07-2006, 07:54 AM	#5
lierro Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 469 Senior Member	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. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-07-2006, 07:54 AM	#6
Charryith Join Date Oct 2005 Location Italy Posts 587 Senior Member	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. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-07-2006, 04:12 PM	#7
inhitoemits Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 537 Senior Member	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. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-07-2006, 05:17 PM	#8
rootoronpunty Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 519 Senior Member	Hmpff.. they should come up with their pricing policy soon. I am afraid that these downloads will be grossly overpriced if you take it into account that you can't even keep these. It should be the standard price of any rental. Not even close to the actual product sold on DVDs etc. But if the pricing is OK, this will definitely will be a COOL thing. Now, PS3 is truly screwed up.. they were before, now they are even more so. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-08-2006, 05:45 AM	#9
tpJKhY8Z Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 514 Senior Member	$4 USD Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-08-2006, 05:52 AM	#10
XqrkN4a0 Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 387 Senior Member	320 points is 3.84 Euros http://www.gangsterpanda.com/mspc.php Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-08-2006, 05:58 AM	#11
pXss8cyx Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 471 Senior Member	Do you need the add-on drive to download the movies? Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-08-2006, 06:01 AM	#12
Virosponna Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 459 Senior Member	Or maybe that was if you want to use your friend's xbox.. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-08-2006, 06:04 AM	#13
Rqvtwlfk Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 453 Senior Member	oh man that's true... ouch. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-08-2006, 08:53 AM	#14
Kryfamid Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 575 Senior Member	I didn't say I wanted one, but the thing has some qualities. What makes you so sure Blueray will fail? Granted, it got on a rough start, but things could pick up. Or it could go the way of Betamax. Or HD-DVD and Bluray could both go the way of SACD and DVD-audio. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-08-2006, 05:46 PM	#15
pushokalex1 Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 418 Senior Member	Originally posted by Kuciwalker Do you need the add-on drive to download the movies? Yes. These are not streaming movies, but downloaded movies. So you would need a hard drive to store the movie before watching. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 3 (0 members and 3 guests)

11-08-2006, 06:07 PM	#16
CAxrrAYN Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 458 Senior Member	Got my HD-DVD today...as suspected, it's really, really quiet when playing -- just like the 360 is when playing DVDs. Have I mentioned it's really pretty? The menus are much faster than DVDs too. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-14-2006, 06:52 AM	#17
Ornamiviant Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 594 Senior Member	Originally posted by laurentius I'm getting really excited about PS3. Xbox360 is starting to look more and more inferior to it. The blu-ray movies look absolutely stunning from 50 inch 1080p flat tv. I don't understand this. Bluray and HD-DVD quality is more or less a wash, perhaps leaning a bit in favour of HD-DVD. And there's not a game on the PS3 that can come close to touching Gears of War. I'm not sure why the 360 is looking inferior? Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-14-2006, 07:02 AM	#18
andrekuper Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 496 Senior Member	Btw Asher have you ever seen a blu-ray movie from a large true HD TV? They look very very impressive. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-14-2006, 07:08 AM	#19
cepAceryTem Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 517 Senior Member	Originally posted by laurentius Btw Asher have you ever seen a blu-ray movie from a large true HD TV? They look very very impressive. Yes. I'm also well aware that most Bluray movies use crap MPEG2 encoding and look worse than their HD-DVD counterpart. I'm also an owner of a 1080p "true HD" (that's marketing BS, by the way) big screen TV and I enjoy my HD-DVD movies on it. You sound like an annoying Sony marketbot with your blatant lies (no 1080p! TRUE HD! XBOX ISNT TRUE HD!!!) and general ignorance... Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

11-14-2006, 07:12 AM	#20
DiatryDal Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 386 Senior Member	bite me . . . . . . . . . . . . Or did you already . . . . . . . good night Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote