Chris Kohler
Culture

HD-DVD Player Pushes 360, Hard

Over on one of Microsoft’s many official Xbox-team-member blogs, the guys in charge of the HD-DVD player add-on talks about how much the damn thing is pushing the capabilities of the Xbox 360 hardware: The Xbox 360 HD DVD Player, for the most part, is an entirely software based implementation. Other players on the market […]

Xbox360dvd

Over on one of Microsoft's many official Xbox-team-member blogs, the guys in charge of the HD-DVD player add-on talks about how much the damn thing is pushing the capabilities of the Xbox 360 hardware:

The Xbox 360 HD DVD Player, for the most part, is an entirely software based implementation. Other players on the market have specialized chips (called DSPs) that decode things like H.264, MPEG, VC1, DTS,
Dolby Digital, and other codecs. Much like how backwards compatibility for Xbox 1 works on Xbox 360, the heavy parts of HD DVD are all done on
Xbox 360's triple-core CPU.

And goes on to say...

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).

Damn. So, uh, when does this beast release, anyway?