XBox 360 DVD Playback Reviewed

Yes, the material in DVD is encoded in 480i (has to be), but if it is film material, two consecutive fields can just be weaved together to create 480p output @ 24fps with no interlacing artefacts.

Also, a properly mastered DVD with film material should have content encoded at 24 fps and flags at some frames which are to be repeated to generate 29.997 for NTSC output.

All the interlacing algorithms and 24/29.997 detection schemes come to play with video material (truly ~60 fields per second) and 24 fps stuff encoded at 29.997 fps.

edit: At least this is my perception of the things, there may be some mistakes and the explanation doesn't go into details.

 

I don't know about NTSC DVD Playback but U.K. PAL DVD playback on the 360 is woefull. The thing is constantly getting the field order wrong on so much stuff, so that you get that horrible juddering as the frames are built wrong using out of order fields. Have only 2 dvd on the unit the 'Peep Show series 1' dvd and 'City of God' ( what an amazing film). On Peep show the play back is fine apart from the end credits where the title just jump all over the place as the field order if detected incorrectly. On ' City of God' weird DVD in that it has about 10 minutes of trailer you HAVE to watch and the field order is detected wrong for the whole section. The actual film played fine though. Image quailty on my very decent CRT is pretty good, there appears to be a little noise but the colours are pretty rich. Overal on bad.

Have to say though that it doesnt begin to compare in image quailty and playback compatibilty to a 5 year old Loewe DVD player i pulled out of a skip recently and fixed. Less noise, very vibrant but natural colours and always detect pull down correctly.

What do people think the chances that MS might do a patch to improve dvd play back? Personally i think if we all mafde enough noise it would be very easy for them to improve it, i mean it got a stunning gpu and the actual video output are of a decent quailty. It just appears the software that it a little duff to me.


Phil

 

I haven't noticed any problems with fields getting displayed incorrectly, but then again, all the stuff I've watched so far has been encoded in progressive format, and I watch on a HD display as well, so there's no interlacing at all going on here...

What bugs me most with the 360's DVD playback stuff is: no slow-mo/frame by frame, rewinding after having paused the movie is bugged (only one speed available; the SLOWEST), picture jerks - often a lot, and sometimes there are pops in the sound as well - after unpausing.

And then there's the big one, the audio desynch/dropped frames problem on certain movies. It's only really bad on some, fortunately. There's hardly any dropped frames at all (if any) on Matrix:Revolutions and War of the Worlds for example. On others, it gets out of synch with the audio and drops frames every couple minutes, it's terribly annoying.

 

Those two complaints are related, in a way, and the second is a feature, i think - hitting FF/RW while paused makes it play at 1/2 speed forwards or backwards. So there is a slow-mo (sort of), but no frame-by-frame, and it's annoying when you want to FF/RW after you've paused, since you have to unpause, _then_ FR/RW. Confused me for a bit until i worked out what it was doing.

Are you using an SD set? Before i got my new LCD, i noticed that sort of problem when i had the console set to 60Hz in the dashboard, it worked fine with it set to 50Hz (seems it sometimes doesn't switch frequency properly for the DVD, so it's having major sync issues). Doesn't seem to be an issue with progressive playback (though it does still have occasional dropped frames and audio desyncs still).

 

Ah. Alright, I have to check that out then. Would be good if stuff like this was actually mentioned somewhere in some documentation of some sort...

Shrek (original PAL region 2 release) has some bad audio/video desynch and dropped frames issue. Dunno what it is that sets it apart from other movies, but it's there...

 

I tried the DVD playback quite a while ago. It's alright. Not even close to my stand-alone player though (Panasonic S77).

 

i've only really watched seinfeld dvd's on my 360 but every now and then on a couple of the discs, playback will freeze for 5-10 seconds, and then the 360 will skip to the next chapter of the disc and resume playing. it does it at the same point on the disc every time. i'm going to try it on my philips and see how it plays to find out if it is a disc error or a system error with the xbox.