Torture test your 360. (With the HDDVD add-on?)

[Crippler]

Yes, the HDDVD pushes the 360 harder than any game right now. While reading a few MS 360 employee blogs I came across the Xbox dev team's blog. They put up a short but interesting read about how HDDVD was implemented all in software on the 360. Even the GPU is allowed to get in on the decoding fun. Here's a little snippet from the blog:

All 6 of Xbox 360's hardware threads are hard at work while playing back an HD DVD. At the moment, the player software pushes Xbox 360 harder than any other (save, perhaps, Gears of War during some particularly busy parts of the game).

Check out the rest of the post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archi...gence-day.aspx

Who would have thought that a movie would push the 360 harder than most games.

[SpOoNmAn]

Awesome, can't wait to torture mine!! They will pass because I don't live in cali, or near Jon for that matter! I kid I kid.

[Crippler]

Originally Posted by SpOoNmAn

Awesome, can't wait to torture mine!! They will pass because I don't live in cali, or near Jon for that matter! I kid I kid.

Oh shiznit. I played Splinter Cell with Jon last night.

[Jon Liu]

Crip, you are doomed forever now! hahaha

[Wondermonkey]

Originally Posted by Crippler

Oh shiznit. I played Splinter Cell with Jon last night.

Wait, so did I. That game I got booted from froze too, and I had to reboot. Jon was in that room!

Oh no...

[KEEZY]

Your 360 just caught a JTD!

[Jon Liu]

wonder, we were wondering where you went!

[CamDawg]

This was one of the points I made a couple of months ago about why I preferred a stand alone unit to the add-on. Think about how hard HD video pushes your computer (I couldn't watch HD trailers on my "old" home system that had a P4 2 GHz and 512MB of RAM without major stuttering). Given how susceptible the 360 seems to possibly heat-related deaths, I was very worried that putting it to this kind of stress on a regular basis might be too much for the poor little guy.

[Wondermonkey]

Originally Posted by Jon Liu

wonder, we were wondering where you went!

Yeah, I was pissed too. It happened just as Crippler killed you both at the same time!

[Fragmintz]

Does that mean that the HD-DVD add on is a ring killer? I am waiting until next year to see if I want to add this to my system. It seems that there might be some kinks to work out first. But think about this - if the HD-DVD add on pushes the system hard, think of what an internal Blue Ray will probably do to the first batch of PS3s... wonder if we'll see a plethora of exploding Sonys and crying fanboys... ah Schadenfraude

[Jon Liu]

lol yeah, it'll be interesting to see how many problems that the PS3 has because of the Blu-ray player..

[GoatMother]

Interst article.. Suprised to hear the HD-DVD is pushing the system so hard.

A little more clarity on the audio as well:

Unlike DVD, where typical players pass the audio data from the disc through to your receiver, HD DVD requires that players mix sounds from menus and such in with the audio being played for the movie. The 360 player software decodes all the above codecs in software, mixes anything that needs to go together, re-encodes it into Dolby Digital and then sends that to your receiver. So, don't be alarmed when your receiver still says "Dolby Digital" even if you've selected DTS in the menus.

[KEEZY]

Oh, now that is interesting... Is DTS better than DD? That would suck if it was, and you were forced to have it given to you as DD.

[HUFN8OR]

For what it's worth, the past few Home Theater Magazine articles have cracked open both a HD-DVD player, and a Blu-Ray player. The HD-DVD player was essentially a PC inside with large heatsinks, power supplies, graphics adapters and whatnot. The Blu-Ray on the other hand was basically a slightly beefed-up DVD player from an innards standpoint. Makes sense then that the 360 will be using it's "PC-like" innards to process the information that will basically be "streaming" from the HD-DVD drive. Thus, heating things up just as if it were processing a major game situation like GOW is touted.

Later,

[MadBryan]

Originally Posted by KEEZY

Oh, now that is interesting... Is DTS better than DD? That would suck if it was, and you were forced to have it given to you as DD.

I think it would still be DTS, just your reciever will say DD

[WormholeXtreme]

It will be DD. The 360 will decode the advanced codecs then re-encode them in DD and output it over the optical connection to your receiver which will then decode the DD.
The Toshiba HD DVD player does the same thing only it re-encodes everything in DTS instead of DD.