Behind the scenes of birthing an HD-DVD

The Xbox platform team is rather proud of their newest baby, the 360’s HD-DVD. After all, they’ve invested 4.7 million lines of code, partner teams from all over Microsoft (including the Windows Vista team), and millions of dollars, not to mention a Gears of War reference. It was the GoW reference that struck us the hardest, though.

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).

Ouch. That heavy? Is this why you guys decided to title your blog post “Emergence Day?”

While the HD-DVD drive itself is a separate box from the 360 box, all the hard work isn’t done in the HD-DVD, but as you’ve seen, in the 360’s processor. The Xbox brain takes on the duties that are usually done by separate chips in other DVD and HD-DVD players: playing video and audio codecs, handling control input and graphic user interface, and so forth, and doing so in an HD manner.

You can check out their blog post at the Read link for their summary of the technical detail that went into creating the 360 HD-DVD player. No Gears of War chainsaws were involved in the making of this accessory.

The Xbox platform team is rather proud of their newest baby, the 360’s HD-DVD. After all, they’ve invested 4.7 million lines of code, partner teams from all over Microsoft (including the Windows Vista team), and millions of dollars, not to mention a Gears of War reference. It was the GoW reference that struck us the hardest, though.

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).

Ouch. That heavy? Is this why you guys decided to title your blog post “Emergence Day?”

While the HD-DVD drive itself is a separate box from the 360 box, all the hard work isn’t done in the HD-DVD, but as you’ve seen, in the 360’s processor. The Xbox brain takes on the duties that are usually done by separate chips in other DVD and HD-DVD players: playing video and audio codecs, handling control input and graphic user interface, and so forth, and doing so in an HD manner.

You can check out their blog post at the Read link for their summary of the technical detail that went into creating the 360 HD-DVD player. No Gears of War chainsaws were involved in the making of this accessory.