HD DVD On the Xbox 360: What About the PC?

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

Other observations; the console is surprisingly quiet when playing back HD DVDs, even though there's a whole lot of code-crunching going on inside. Since there's (at least at the moment….are those extra pads on the Xbox 360's A/V connector really unused?) no audio-inclusive HDMI v1.3 output available, I'm restricted to six-channel Dolby Digital audio playback over S/PDIF (decoded by my home theater receiver). The Universal Media Remote bundled with the HD DVD peripheral works well; I have a Harmony/Logitech Avanced Universal Remote, too, but haven't tried it yet. And we both think that the enhanced UI offered by HD DVDs (navigation menu and picture-in-picture pop-ups while the movie is playing, etc) is pretty cool, too.

So do I think you should all run out and buy HD DVD players, and refresh your media library with HD DVDs? Well….not exactly. If you don't have a high-quality HDTV, the added resolution will go to waste, of course. And even if you do, I agree with Maury; the differences between DVD and HD DVD are subtle (and DVD's deficiencies are only evident upon side-by-side comparison with HD DVD), certainly nothing like the quality jump that accompanied the transition from VHS/Beta to DVD. But now that I have the HD DVD player, will I select HD DVDs over DVDs from Blockbuster when both rental options are available for a title I want to see? Of course. And although I rarely buy movies (and likely won't be re-buying in HD DVD the few titles I already own on DVD), will I select a HD DVD over a DVD for future purchases, especially if the price differential between them isn't outrageous? Absolutely.

I suspect that the resolution differences between DVD and HD DVD will be even more noticeable on fixed-pixel displays such as LCD and plasma. I've successfully USB-tethered the Xbox 360 HD DVD peripheral to my Windows XP Pro-based desktop PC (by the way, ignore the two Xbox 360 Memory Controller driver-not-found errors; I believe they refer to the two USB ports on the back on of the HD DVD drive), including installing the UDF v2.5 drivers (which, also by the way, you can directly download from Toshiba's support website, and also also by the way, the peripheral's natively supported in Vista) that let me browse the content of the King Kong HD DVD. And I also have a copy of InterVideo's WinDVD v8 Platinum, which claims to support HD DVDs. But there's one very important qualifier….the program's AACS support, according to this AVS Forum thread, won't be ready until early next year. And until it is, the program downscales all high-def content to 540-line resolution, regardless of whether or not your PC-to-display interconnect is analog or digital, whether or not (in the digital case) the graphics subsystem and display are HDCP-cogniscent, and (in the analog case) whether or not the content has activated the Image Constraint Token.

Until InterVideo (or CyberLink or Sonic, for that matter, or some other DVD playback sofware vendor for Mac OS X or Windows) gets their act together, or until someone figures out a full-res enabling hack for WinDVD in the interim, I'll try to dig up some AACS-free HD DVD (and matching DVD) material so that I can report back LCD- and PC-based findings. I'll close for now with a few addendums to my earlier coverage:

• Utility options for transcoding video to Xbox 360-friendly WMV include Videora's Xbox 360 Converter, and VLC, WinAvi and Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder.
• If you want to stream podcasts to your Xbox 360, check out TVersity and XB Stream.
• And if you'd like to read about the Xbox 360's development history, check out Dean Takahashi's book The Xbox 360 Uncloaked (Dean previously published 'Opening the Xbox'). I must admit that I found portions of it difficult to follow; Dean tended to unnecessarily repeat himself sometimes, and more generally the book feels rushed to market and would have benefited from a bit more editing clean-up. But other portions of it are very interesting, and all in all it's not bad by any means.

Followup: I was surprised last night, when my wife and I fired up the HD DVD of Jarhead, to be prompted for an available program update….