HD DVD pushes Xbox 360 harder than games

The HD DVD software pushes your Xbox 360’s system resources pretty hard. “Except maybe for Gears of War during some particularly busy parts of the game,” said the Xbox development team. Why would HD DVD use up so many system resources on the Xbox 360?

Backwards compatibility: software instead of hardware. HD DVD is not “just DVD with HD content.” Many HD DVD players out there have special hardware called DSP chips. From our understanding of the development team’s news, the Xbox 360 doesn’t have the DSPs needed. So how do you make the HD DVD that just came out compatible with the Xbox 360? With software.

This is a lot like how backwards compatibility for the Xbox 1 work on the Xbox 360.

What software? Oh, about 4.7 million lines of code. Video Codecs: H.264, MPEG-2, VC1. Audio Codecs: Dolby Digital+, DTS, TrueHD, LPCM, MPEG. HDi: The HD DVD runtime engine. Graphics Device Interface: Drawing menus, etc. AACS: Cryptography/DRM stuff. Media Foundation: Audio/Video pipeline.

As for codecs, well, Microsoft had a lot of PC codecs, but these had to optimized for the Xbox 360. By the way, the software decodes everything into Dolby, so don’t panic if you keep seeing “Dolby Digital.”

Bottom line. We leave you where we started (and the Gears of War console skin, in honor of the fact that the game sometimes pushes your 360 as hard as HD DVD):

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).

The HD DVD software pushes your Xbox 360’s system resources pretty hard. “Except maybe for Gears of War during some particularly busy parts of the game,” said the Xbox development team. Why would HD DVD use up so many system resources on the Xbox 360?

Backwards compatibility: software instead of hardware. HD DVD is not “just DVD with HD content.” Many HD DVD players out there have special hardware called DSP chips. From our understanding of the development team’s news, the Xbox 360 doesn’t have the DSPs needed. So how do you make the HD DVD that just came out compatible with the Xbox 360? With software.

This is a lot like how backwards compatibility for the Xbox 1 work on the Xbox 360.

What software? Oh, about 4.7 million lines of code. Video Codecs: H.264, MPEG-2, VC1. Audio Codecs: Dolby Digital+, DTS, TrueHD, LPCM, MPEG. HDi: The HD DVD runtime engine. Graphics Device Interface: Drawing menus, etc. AACS: Cryptography/DRM stuff. Media Foundation: Audio/Video pipeline.

As for codecs, well, Microsoft had a lot of PC codecs, but these had to optimized for the Xbox 360. By the way, the software decodes everything into Dolby, so don’t panic if you keep seeing “Dolby Digital.”

Bottom line. We leave you where we started (and the Gears of War console skin, in honor of the fact that the game sometimes pushes your 360 as hard as HD DVD):

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).