Is MS using consumers?

The few hours I watched were some of the best content I have ever watched. It looks gorgeous and is very educational. It really puts a petty primate like myself into perspective to see all the different ecosystems and species on Earth. I have to refrain myself from watching it all without my wife around.

 

Wait.....WHAT? There would be NO sense whatsoever in adding an HD-DVD drive to the elite. For one, the cost would be higher than the PS3, thus making Sony look gracious and MS look downright foolish. Secondly, the HD-DVD drive wouldn't be able to read DVDs at the same speed as the other 360 drives. "Sorry your games stutter and don't stream well, but isn't King Kong awesome."

 

I'm alking in terms of picture quality.

 

Ahh, I thought it looked great, but I'm not a videophile.

 

Probably because its hard to feel screwed over when the cheapest BluRay alternative cost 3X or more and a strategy of purchasing HD-DVD add-on now and a $300.00 BluRay player (whether that be a PS3 or standalone) later if HD DVD fails is still cheaper and more economically feasible than plopping down $600.00 at one time.

 

Amazon and Microsoft announced Indie film project to bolster the HD-DVD format.

http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=002000866FEW

Tommy McClain

 

Probably MS just did what they could do at that time, I guess it was Toshiba's request that Microsoft sell the add-on rather than MS's intention. Moreover a Blu-ray add-on is unrealistic considering it's hard for 360 to decode 40Mbps H.264 and they need to implement a necessary software stack including Java, its price can be more expensive than Xbox itself.

IMO the more interesting perspective is Microsoft is helping HD DVD in its right hand but its left hand is helping Blu-ray. Windows PC users, their main customers, will choose Blu-ray no doubt because of data storage. In 2 years BD-R will replace DVD-R just like DVD-R replaced CD-R and a new PC will carry only a BD burner. These days you can buy a 20x DVD burner for $40 and manufacturers are seeking the next big thing. Incidentally Mitsubishi and Matsushita have announced brand-new disc media SKUs today,

Mitsubishi DR30T1 - HD DVD-R (dual-layer - 30GB) (1x write) - $32 (estimated street price)
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2007/0703/mcmedia.htm
Matsushita LM-BR50LD - BD-R (dual-layer - 50GB) (4x write) - $32 (estimated street price)
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2007/0703/pana.htm

and it's instantly clear which is promising in the PC space even without thinking about hard-coat and whatnot. Matsushita (Panasonic) has announced a 4x BD burner too.

 

What are you basing the notion that its hard for 360 to decode 40Mbs? HD DVD is already at 30Mbps and I've seen no indication that 40Mbps is an issue. Slower single core CPU's achieve the entropy decode very well, much of the rest of the process is achieved by Xenos.

 

Microsoft does this almost across the board. They call it coopetition, where one team may be cooperating and helping a competitor of another team. The Office team does this extensively with competitors of their Dynamics business applications.

 

Have we got a proper explanation for the 15Mbps limit in H.264 playback on Xbox 360 yet?

 

Agreed, it shouldn't have any trouble doing this. In fact, if anything HD-DVD is the harder spec to implement, as it requires the ability to play primary and secondary video streams simultaneously (think director's commentary in a separate window). AFAIK the BluRay spec does not have this.

On the other hand, BluRay does require BD-J. I'm not sure of the overhead that would consume, but it seems like it would be less than another video stream. After all, under duress you could always starve BD-J of CPU cycles, whereas there's no way to gracefully degrade the video or audio streams short of dropping frames, which is always noticeable. Of course, no one knows for sure since no discs have been authored with BD-J yet (again, AFAIK).

 

Do you realize an HD DVD drive offers only 36Mbps as the aggregated bandwidth vs 54Mbps for Blu-ray?

 

AFAIK its 30Mbps and 40Mbps sustained bitrates for HD DVD and Blu ray respectively.

As for the 15Mbps limit on 360 this is for file playback, not HD DVD.

 

Doesn't that 30Mbps include audio? Is the effective Mbps lower for the 360 since it doesn't support the advanced high bitrate audio?

 

Those are the specs on the physical drive/medium itself. Blu-Ray's maximum VBR is 40 Mbps. I'm not sure of HD-DVD's, but 30 Mbps is probably about right. I still maintain it's more computationally difficult to decode two streams totaling 30 Mbps than one at 40 Mbps. That obviously not true at all bitrates, but in this case I believe it is.

It's irrelevant anyway. The original point is that the 360 could have a Blu-Ray add-on and decode a 40 Mbps VC-1 stream if they wanted to. That still stands.

 

I would speculate that they are using a different decoder for file playback which needs to be more robust since you are more likely to encounter "eccentric" encodes than you would while playing back a studio release. They have likely not finished optimizing this decoder.

For my part, I'd be more interested in seeing them add multichannel AAC playback.