So, we've now had a chance to watch two movies with the HD-DVD player on the XBox 360: Aeon Flux and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.  The image quality is, of course, fantastic.  HD-DVD outputs at 1080p but our TV is only 720p .  Still, it looks great.  The sound, I'm sure, is great, too, but we're only using stereo speakers at the moment. 

Someone recently asked me if it actually made a difference.  I asked them if going from a computer screen resolution of 640x480 to 1600x1200 made any difference in web browsing.  It really does make a big difference in clarity and sharpness.  Do you sit there every second of watching the movie and actually notice all of the new detail?  Well, no, not exactly.  However, that's more because when watching a movie or TV show, the average person tends to zone out on details, including the size of the TV or how big the black bars are on the top or sides. It's a form of motion blindness where only what changes tends to be noticed over time (a bigger problem in driving than watching TV, though).

Just before the release of the HD-DVD drive, the 360 got an upgrade to support 1080p in addition to 720p and 1080i for HD output.  Now, we have component cables and a standard DB-25 VGA cable for our XBox 360.  Our TV supports both for input, as well.  When using the component cables, we can choose 720p, 1080i, or 1080p.  Since our TV only supports up to 720p or 1080i, we'd choose one of those.  On the VGA side, if you use those cables you can choose a bunch of different resolutions depending on what the monitor can support.  These vary from 640x480 all the way up to 1920x1080.  I've used it at 1280x1024, 1280x720, and now I typically use it at one of the new resolutions, 1360x768.

Our TV is actually 1366x768.  That's how it can do 720p and 1080i.  That said, it's a rather odd resolution since 720p is supposed to be 1280x720, which many TVs have as a resolution.  I would also have thought that 1080i would have been 1920x540, interlaced.  But every TV that I see with 1080i resolution is 1366x768.  This means you never get a pixel perfect screen, which is more important on an LCD screen than on a analog CRT monitor.  And then you have the XBox that outputs 1360x768 which does, in fact, leave a few black pixels on either side, although it's much better than the previous resolution of 1280x720.

The screen is much sharper running the TV using the VGA input and a resolution of 1360x768 than it is running it at 720p on the component cables.  That said, the contrast does look better with the component cables, but the colors aren't as good and there is usually some ghosting. This setup would be perfect if the VGA cable had optical output.  However, it doesn't.  It only has stereo out that we send to our stereo speakers.  I haven't looked around to see if any other VGA cables have optical out, but that's the primary problem we have now.  In our current situation, it's not too big of a deal since we can't run much volume, anyway. 

Now, with playing DVDs or HD-DVDs, it's the XBox that does any scaling needed to the resolution you set with the LCD monitor.  It would also seem that the XBox 360 scaling is much better than that of our TV.  From what I've heard, the XBox 360 will only scale the DVD output to 480p (from 480i).  However, this can't be the case with the VGA out, otherwise it would be in a small window on the screen.  This is also another reason we think movies look better through the VGA cable as we think the XBox 360 is scaling the image much better than the monitor.  For HD-DVDs, this is actually a down-scaling, too. (Although, I want to see if I can get the output on to our 30" Dell monitor, where a 1920x1080 image would be up-scaled by the monitor to 2560x1600 to fit on the screen.)

So, anyway, the HD-DVD movies look great even at 1360x768 on our Samsung LCD TV.  They sound great on stereo speakers and will sound better hooked up to a 5.1 system or better.  However, that's not the only thing that HD-DVD has over the DVD format.  They've also upgraded the menu and scripting system. In general, the menus tend to be similar to the DVD ones right now.  Most people would be hard pressed to identify things a regular DVD couldn't do.  That's probably good for familiarity with the system. 

However, there was one thing that we noticed on Tokyo Drift that actually got in the way a couple of times.  It turns out that an HD-DVD can basically support a screen saver.  In this case, it was a screen saver of the publishers logo.  This was interesting when it came over the menu while the menu was just sitting there.  It was also interesting when it came up while the movie was paused.  It was not interesting when it came up twice at the exact moment I hit the play button when the movie was paused.  In fact, the timing once was odd but a second time it no longer seemed like a coincidence.  It ate the key press though, so I had to hit play a second time to actually get the movie going again.  I don't know if that's an XBox 360 bug, a bug in the scripting on this particular movie, or just bad timing on my part.  We didn't notice anything like this on Aeon Flux, either.

Aside from the better viewing experience, another advantage for us to have the HD-DVD drive on our XBox 360 is that it saves wear on the the game drive in the system itself.  If we wear out the HD-DVD drive (like we did with the drive in the original XBox) from playing too many movies, we can just replace it with another.  Wearing out the internal drive means sending the system in for repair.

Additionally, the drive will apparently work fine on a regular computer as an external HD-DVD drive.  We have no reason for that use currently, but it's nice to know that it might work.

Overall, it was a surprisingly small amount of money to play for the added benefits, especially when compared to the cost of getting a full HD-DVD or Bluray player. Since we use Netflix, there has been no additional cost in buying movies.

Posted by Shane on December 15, 2006 1:30 AM | Permalink