External add-on HD-DVD player for the Xbox 360 for <$200
#501
DVD Talk Limited Edition
That just sounds totally ridiculous. I'm sure they will have a problem selling out of PS3's
Hmmmm, let's NOT put product on the floor that we CAN sell and not make money on it. Sounds like a solid business plan to me.
I will check the 7th.
*EDIT*
After looking at Best Buy.com, if you estimate shipping on the HD-DVD, it says the 17th with Next Day? So, what is the release date?
Hmmmm, let's NOT put product on the floor that we CAN sell and not make money on it. Sounds like a solid business plan to me.
I will check the 7th.
*EDIT*
After looking at Best Buy.com, if you estimate shipping on the HD-DVD, it says the 17th with Next Day? So, what is the release date?
Last edited by DJ_Longfellow; 11-04-06 at 09:20 PM.
#502
DVD Talk Gold Edition
The ship date at GameStop/EB Games is the 7th so they should be in stores on the 8th, but it seems as though recently the hardware/accessories have been shipped 2 day instead of next day according to the local store. They got the Halo faceplate, and the wireless headset 2-3 days after the ship date so if it holds true on the HD DVD then expect it Friday in store.
I have one pre-ordered and will be in the store on the 8th for Gears of War anyway so I hope they get it then too.
I have one pre-ordered and will be in the store on the 8th for Gears of War anyway so I hope they get it then too.
#505
Originally Posted by jiggawhat
I just noticed the ship date for the 360 I ordered at Amazon is November 15th which is the day after the reported launch of 11/14 by OXM.
#506
DVD Talk Limited Edition
Originally Posted by Mopower
Do those 12% off Best Buy Reward member coupons work on this?
#511
I hope this extra allocation of players Amazon got still includes Kong. I'm assuming that's all Microsoft has made so far is this limited bundle pack and then when they sell out, they'll have a standard pack ready to replace them.
#512
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Originally Posted by DJ_Longfellow
I just got a 10% coupon in the Best Buy catalog (mail) and it says off Video Game Accessories....so, I can at least save 10%, plus DOUBLE RZ points PLUS I have like $55 in RZ certs yeah!
#513
DVD Talk God
Originally Posted by juanmgonzalez
BB will figure out a way to tell you that it's Game Hardware, which is usually excluded in the fine print on coupons
#514
DVD Talk Hero
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1158321865239
BestBuy.com at least has it under the "360 Accessories" category. Print that page out as "people's exhibit A".
BestBuy.com at least has it under the "360 Accessories" category. Print that page out as "people's exhibit A".
#515
DVD Talk Limited Edition
Originally Posted by pinata242
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1158321865239
BestBuy.com at least has it under the "360 Accessories" category. Print that page out as "people's exhibit A".
BestBuy.com at least has it under the "360 Accessories" category. Print that page out as "people's exhibit A".
#516
DVD Talk God
Originally Posted by pinata242
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1158321865239
BestBuy.com at least has it under the "360 Accessories" category. Print that page out as "people's exhibit A".
BestBuy.com at least has it under the "360 Accessories" category. Print that page out as "people's exhibit A".
#517
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An excellent article here on what it took to get the 360 to play HD-DVD's with the new add-on....
What takes 4.7 million lines of code, partner teams from all over Microsoft, and millions of dollars to create? The Xbox 360 system software? Nope. This is just the HD DVD player.
The Xbox platform team (us) is experiencing its own emergence day as of late; we've been hard at work for the past 8 months straight bringing the fall system update to fruition. I haven't even posted since August. Daryl's already gone over a lot of the features and changes that are in this release. I've personally been working on the Xbox 360 HD DVD player (which, by the way, reached the #1 best seller slot on Amazon.com's video games category) and I thought I'd go over some of the technical difficulties it takes to bring HD DVD to market.
There's a perception that HD DVD is just DVD with HD content, but once you look at things more closely, it's clear that HD DVD is a different beast altogether. The Xbox platform team became serious about HD DVD last year, when Microsoft as a company threw its endorsement behind the standard.
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.
If DVD is an audio/video pipeline with some navigation data (go to the menu, start playing, etc.), HD DVD can be considered a runtime environment where audio/video playback is just one major feature. So let's break down that 4.7 million lines of code. I don't have the numbers for each component, but each of these is a very significant chunk:
* Video Codecs: H.264, MPEG-2, VC1
* Audio Codecs: Dolby Digital+, DTS, TrueHD, LPCM, MPEG
* HDi: The HD DVD runtime engine.
* GDI: Drawing stuff like menus
* AACS: Cryptography/DRM stuff
* MF: Audio/Video pipeline
That's a lot of stuff. Some of the acronyms may not be recognizable. GDI is the Graphics Device Interface, which has been a mainstay of the Windows operating system for many years, providing facilities to draw stuff on screens. MF is Media Foundation - a framework for audio/video pipelines that was being built for Windows Vista. The Windows teams in charge of the above components all pitched in to make them work on Xbox 360 while continuing to work on other Windows projects (Vista, CE, etc.) - quite a task.
A lot of the codecs existed in code at Microsoft before the Xbox 360 HD DVD Player was being built. However, it was all code that was optimized for PC platforms (windows/x86) and not Xbox 360's PPC core. This meant doing a lot of optimization. In this regard, the Xbox 360 implementation of H.264 can be considered a crowning achievement. For this computationally expensive codec, a hybrid approach was taken. Since GPUs are very good at parallelized workloads, stuff that could be parallelized is computed there, while the stuff that can't is better suited to the CPU and is done there.
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.
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).
If I'd have known how much work it was going to be bringing the 360 HD DVD Player out this year, I may not have signed up last year, but now that I can watch HD movies, it's hard to go back to crummy old DVD
http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archi...gence-day.aspx
The Xbox platform team (us) is experiencing its own emergence day as of late; we've been hard at work for the past 8 months straight bringing the fall system update to fruition. I haven't even posted since August. Daryl's already gone over a lot of the features and changes that are in this release. I've personally been working on the Xbox 360 HD DVD player (which, by the way, reached the #1 best seller slot on Amazon.com's video games category) and I thought I'd go over some of the technical difficulties it takes to bring HD DVD to market.
There's a perception that HD DVD is just DVD with HD content, but once you look at things more closely, it's clear that HD DVD is a different beast altogether. The Xbox platform team became serious about HD DVD last year, when Microsoft as a company threw its endorsement behind the standard.
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.
If DVD is an audio/video pipeline with some navigation data (go to the menu, start playing, etc.), HD DVD can be considered a runtime environment where audio/video playback is just one major feature. So let's break down that 4.7 million lines of code. I don't have the numbers for each component, but each of these is a very significant chunk:
* Video Codecs: H.264, MPEG-2, VC1
* Audio Codecs: Dolby Digital+, DTS, TrueHD, LPCM, MPEG
* HDi: The HD DVD runtime engine.
* GDI: Drawing stuff like menus
* AACS: Cryptography/DRM stuff
* MF: Audio/Video pipeline
That's a lot of stuff. Some of the acronyms may not be recognizable. GDI is the Graphics Device Interface, which has been a mainstay of the Windows operating system for many years, providing facilities to draw stuff on screens. MF is Media Foundation - a framework for audio/video pipelines that was being built for Windows Vista. The Windows teams in charge of the above components all pitched in to make them work on Xbox 360 while continuing to work on other Windows projects (Vista, CE, etc.) - quite a task.
A lot of the codecs existed in code at Microsoft before the Xbox 360 HD DVD Player was being built. However, it was all code that was optimized for PC platforms (windows/x86) and not Xbox 360's PPC core. This meant doing a lot of optimization. In this regard, the Xbox 360 implementation of H.264 can be considered a crowning achievement. For this computationally expensive codec, a hybrid approach was taken. Since GPUs are very good at parallelized workloads, stuff that could be parallelized is computed there, while the stuff that can't is better suited to the CPU and is done there.
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.
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).
If I'd have known how much work it was going to be bringing the 360 HD DVD Player out this year, I may not have signed up last year, but now that I can watch HD movies, it's hard to go back to crummy old DVD
http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archi...gence-day.aspx
#519
Suspended
Originally Posted by Spiky
Wow. Tragic that M$ actually had to write some of their own fresh code. Nothing on the market to steal.
The Guide button on the 360 worked...lets include that in our PS3 controller!
Wii has motion sensor...lets incorporate something like that!
N64 has Analog sticks...lets do that with the new updated PS1 controllers!
C'mon.
#520
DVD Talk Legend
Originally Posted by GizmoDVD
Please. Sony has stolen way too much over the years.
The Guide button on the 360 worked...lets include that in our PS3 controller!
Wii has motion sensor...lets incorporate something like that!
N64 has Analog sticks...lets do that with the new updated PS1 controllers!
C'mon.
The Guide button on the 360 worked...lets include that in our PS3 controller!
Wii has motion sensor...lets incorporate something like that!
N64 has Analog sticks...lets do that with the new updated PS1 controllers!
C'mon.
#522
Suspended
Originally Posted by digitalfreaknyc
Didn't they want the vibrating controllers?
#524
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Right, I don't know why the Edit Posts icon isn't showing up for me in Firefox, so I'll just post another post right under that one.
Microsoft has already announced that this thing will work as a data and video drive in Windows Vista. Plus it ingeniously has 2 USB 2.0 ports in the back, thus letting you connect it to both your 360 and your computer at the same time.
At $200 it's a great deal if it works as claimed with both your PC and your 360.
Microsoft has already announced that this thing will work as a data and video drive in Windows Vista. Plus it ingeniously has 2 USB 2.0 ports in the back, thus letting you connect it to both your 360 and your computer at the same time.
At $200 it's a great deal if it works as claimed with both your PC and your 360.
#525
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They never claimed it would work on your PC. They said that they've done nothing to stop it from working.
The problem is that, at the moment, there are no programs that will play the contents.
I'm sure once someone figures that out, they will sell even more.
The problem is that, at the moment, there are no programs that will play the contents.
I'm sure once someone figures that out, they will sell even more.