HD DVD On the Xbox 360: Upbeat (and Unexpected!) Results

Well, I'll be….Based on my past predictions, coupled with a co-worker's observations, I was poised to report to you all that HD DVD playback on my living room home theater setup wasn't worth the added cost versus conventional DVD. Well, it turns out I can't (definitively, at least) do that. First, though, let me tell you about my setup, because as I've explained before, results will vary depending on factors such as:

• The acuity of one's eyes
• The characteristics of one's display
• One's viewing distance from that display
• One's viewing environment's ambient lighting conditions
• The specific content one chooses to view, and the compression algorithm, bitrate and other configuration options under which that content was encoded
• Etc.

My display is a high-quality Princeton Digital AF3.0HD 30" widescreen CRT, which I've recently calibrated. A first-generation HDTV, it has no digital inputs; the Xbox 360, connected to it over VGA, is set to the console's 1024×768 (progressive-scan) widescreen display mode. For comparison purposes, my Pioneer DV-563A universal DVD/SACD player tethers to the AF3.0HD over one of the two available component video input suites (the monitor's other component video input set connects to my ATSC set-top box).

The DV-563A does not upscale conventional DVDs to 720- or 1080-line interpolated resolutions, whereas the Xbox 360's built-in DVD player does; you'll see in a minute why this is important. The Xbox 360 and DV-563A both employ the AF3.0HD's 'anamorphic' display mode, so their sharpness, luminance, chrominance and other settings are identical. We typically view the display from a distance of 10-11 feet, and under low ambient illumination conditions exclusively comprised of dim, diffused lighting to either side and behind the display.

After viewing the King Kong HD DVD on Friday night, I queued both it and its companion DVD (initially in the DV-563A) up again yesterday evening. I was able to chapter-match both discs and, by selectively toggling between appropriate display inputs and alternatively employing the two remote controls' play, pause and chapter skip buttons, undertake a series of A-versus-B comparisons of portions of the film which I thought would be particularly quality-revealing. What I found greatly surprised me; not only was there noticeably added detail in the HD DVD version, it had a more accurate color palate (skin tones, for example, were excessively ruddy on the DVD). Summing it up, the HD DVD version of the film was more three-dimensional and lifelike.

Mine was not a fair test, however, as I knew in advance which content I was viewing at any particular point in time. So I called my wife into the living room and repeated the study, with a couple of twists to make it more double-blind in nature:

• I didn't tell her which video input was which (DVD, or HD DVD)
• I blocked her view of my hands, and of the remote controls I was manipulating in them
• I ran the two DVDs a few seconds apart (first with the DVD leading the HD DVD, then lagging it, to be statistically balanced), so that, in conjunction with display input toggling, it was easy to quickly compare short segments of material.

Her observations matched mine "to a t"; she was consistently able to pick out (and prefer) the HD DVD material, and for the same reasons I'd previously noted.

We then compared the HD DVD against the DVD, this time both running on the Xbox 360 (with the DVD ensconsed in the console's built-in optical drive….remember that as I said earlier, and unlike the PS3, the Xbox 360 rescales video and game content to the target display device's resolution). This was a more difficult (and therefore, truth be told, less statistically meaningful) test. Since both drives employed the same console and therefore the same display input, toggling between the DVD and HD DVD took more time and therefore left our observations subject to fading-memory distortions. However, we both still preferred the HD DVD, a result which wasn't terribly surprising; no matter how good the DVD upscaling algorithm (and I don't know how sophisticated the one on the Xbox 360 is), it's still interpolation-creating pixels not present in the DVD's original content. Real pixels beat 'fake' pixels every time.

Continued with 'HD DVD On the Xbox 360: What About the PC?'