XBox 360 DVD Playback Reviewed

[expletive]

It seems MS disagrees with your assessment of consumers interested in movie playback on consoles. Otherwise, why did they even bother to put a DVD player functionality in X360 (could've saved the buyer some money on licensing, and it's not like the existing userbase of standalone DVD players are still a rarity)? Why even bother with the extra detail of the fan system scaling down during movie playback, if it is worth nobody's time to watch movies on X360? Why do they even bother to rattle the saber about an HD-DVD external drive for HD movies on X360. That would seem to suggest somebody is interested in that market. It is simply another example of "convergence" strategy in effect. No one questions what the point of PVR functionality on some future X360 or streaming PC media hub when you can just get a standalone hdd tuner device, do they?

In the case of the 360 there were likely no additional fees to include DVD playback. They already had to buy a DVD drive for data and theyre using ATIs software decoder which was probably included as part of the Xenos contract. Scaling the fan system down was going to be implemented for Arcade and dashboard activity as well, not just DVD playback so no uptick there.

I dont questiont he point of PVR functionality because for me it presents a huge benefit. My wife and i frequently choose to watch shows in different rooms in the house and cant now becuase we dont always have all our shows on every DVR.

Just because people are interested in DVD players doesnt mean the optimal use of them comes by being inegrated onto a game machine. Its convenient and cost effective for some but at the end of the day the stand alone player is still much more user friendly and familiar for a vast majority of the public. And for those willing to spend a little more, features and performance are better as well. Thats not to say that anyone couldnt be equally satisfied with a player in a console, just that theres a valid argument the other way.

 

[breez]

I'm not sure what youre saying here, that some of the content on DVDs is actually native 480p?

The way i understand it is this...

What tends to trip players up is the way the mastering studio encodes the soruce material and what ways the player can detect what that source material is. The 2 main types are video and film. Video was shot at 29.97 fps and film at 24 fps. Now players look for ways to determine what the original source material was so they can apply the right algorithm to the DVD which is 480i. Using a set of encoded flags or auto detecting is what puts the player in film mode or video mode. If they player cannot determine what the source format it you get deitnerlacing artifacts and they look bad. (thats not what we're seeing in the linked thread however). So if you look at the review theres a bunch of ways that players determine the source and they test almost all the known encoding strategies. The more tests a player fails, the lower it scores. The player scored a 71 which is pretty good in the larger picture but given the power of the unit he was probably hoping for something in teh 80s and to pass more of the tests i.e. "more on the deinterlacing side".

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.

 

[lefizz]

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

 

[Guden Oden]

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.

 

[arhra]

no slow-mo/frame by frame, rewinding after having paused the movie is bugged (only one speed available; the SLOWEST)

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.

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.

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).

 

[Guden Oden]

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.

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...

though it does still have occasional dropped frames and audio desyncs still.

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...

 

[DeathKnight]

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

 

[turkish a. punkass]

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.