Topic: Fall Update07: Still a Crummy DVD Player (Read 626 times)

Xbox-Scene · « **on:** December 05, 2007, 04:15:00 PM »

Fall Update07: Still a Crummy DVD Player
Posted by XanTium | December 5 17:39 EST | News Category: Xbox360

(IMG:http://www.burstnet.com/cgi-bin/ads/ad9520b.cgi/ns/v=2.1S/sz=300x250A/

Quote

Early this year I wrote about how the Xbox 360 is a flawed DVD player, complete with pictures of some of the various errors you can expect. I hoped Microsoft would fix it with each major update. So when I looked over the really long and detailed list of Dashboard updates the other day, a few things stuck out at me. One is the nebulous "Improved deinterlacer support for video playback." Could this be the DVD fix I was hoping for?

Nope. I just updated the Xbox 360 in the lab and ran it into a TV using the VGA input at 1080p. With this I used the popular HQV DVD test disc, and the Xbox 360 scored a whopping 40. That's out of 130! Rather than show you the whole scoring chart, let me break it down for you: The 360 passed the Color Bars/Vertical Detail test (nearly everything does), the Picture Detail test, and the horizontal and vertical crawls. That's it. It failed every noise reduction, film mode, jaggies, and cadence detection test there is. In nearly every case, it was a clear failure; not...even...close.

Oh, the hi-def situation isn't much better. HQV makes a hi-def test disc for HD DVD and Blu-ray players, and the 360 scores a zero (out of 100). These tests are much simpler, involving simply de-interlacing 1080i content of both regular and film mode content, and noise reduction. It's like nothing is going on there at all.

Full Story: extremetech.com

angryyoungnpoor · « **Reply #1 on:** December 05, 2007, 04:45:00 PM »

I bought it for games. I have 10 other dvd players that I'm able to use just fine. The added features of avi make it so that I can view avi files without going on my computer.

mlmadmax · « **Reply #2 on:** December 05, 2007, 04:55:00 PM »

I think this guy is being overly criticle and needs to understand that most people would think the playback thrue hdmi or vga is passable. This is one of thos uber nerd video guys who's like ohhh by blue is one parsec out of calibration with the industy standard all this equipment is crap.

Playback thrue hdmi looks pretty good IMHO actually but he didn't test with that type of connection. When I used to have a component equiped 360 that looked really bad when playing dvd's even at 480p. My hdmi 360 does a dam good job of upconvering to 1080. It is not as good as my oppo so i use that but it is not like movies are unwatchable.

As far as the hd-dvd playback there is no difference in pq versus a standalone so i don't know what he is talkin about.

feflicker · « **Reply #3 on:** December 05, 2007, 05:06:00 PM »

As far as I am concerned DVD playback is a "bonus" feature, so the fact that it will play a dvd and look half-way decent is nice. Basically my 360 is my failover DVD player, should I be on the road or my settop break at 1am.

Now, for the HD-DVD add-on, I would EXPECT that to perform well since that add-on is specifically used for movie playback...

flashfreak · « **Reply #4 on:** December 05, 2007, 05:10:00 PM »

The HD-DVD scoring 0 kinda makes sense. I have transformers and it looks great, but some dark scenes have a lot of noise in them, and i was just thinking that obviously its better than DVD but maybe this is as far as they can get. But now im real tempted to try it in a stand alone DVD player on my tv. The sound is great though, one part in transformers shakes my house, and im sure those of you who have it and have a nice big sub know the big im talking about.

Also, i was playing back a divx movie, and it looked crap. Was fine on my comp, but i think the 360 was playing it back in 480p. The menus (the 360 options at the bottom) looked poor and the video quality was appaling. When i put the video to standard size, it was tiny. If it was 480p, it'd be nearly fullscreen. So im not sure whats going on there but its definately crapper than i expected.

Also, why is it so hard to play videos off a disc in media centre? Only thing i can find is the library.

Gmc · « **Reply #5 on:** December 05, 2007, 05:21:00 PM »

My 360's too loud to be used as a dvd player anyway imo

modistru · « **Reply #6 on:** December 05, 2007, 05:22:00 PM »

The point is that it IS a DVD player regardless if you use it or not. Although it has been pointed out to be a blatently horrible player, fixing the problems it has have not been addressed (or acknowledged). See the original article for just how bad this player is. Even xbox1's SW player beats its quality. That's just not right. The horsepower exists in there for it to be upsampling/DTS and then some.

This post has been edited by modistru: Dec 6 2007, 01:27 AM

bucko · « **Reply #7 on:** December 05, 2007, 05:31:00 PM »

it's a games console what you expect. buy a £10 DVD player if your so bummed.

fiya · « **Reply #8 on:** December 05, 2007, 05:00:00 PM »

QUOTE(modistru @ Dec 6 2007, 02:22 AM)

The point is that it IS a DVD player regardless if you use it or not. Although it has been pointed out to be a blatently horrible player, fixing the problems it has have not been addressed (or acknowledged). See the original article for just how bad this player is. Even xbox1's SW player beats its quality. That's just not right. The horsepower exists in there for it to be upsampling/DTS and then some.

its not important. the most important feature that MS should be worrying about is game playback

As long as they keep that up, im happy.

MS is like the mother of 13 million crybabies; she just can't feed all of them at once! unfortunately, these babies have internet access...

feflicker · « **Reply #9 on:** December 05, 2007, 05:38:00 PM »

I bet PS3's DVD playback is AMAZING. Why? Because they delayed the release of their console an entire year to get Blueray working just right. MS$? They just released a reasonable "Free" DVD player in their console and spent that development time working on Xbox Live, the dashboard, and getting their product to market.

+1 MS$ if you ask me

Mike4 · « **Reply #10 on:** December 05, 2007, 05:42:00 PM »

Admittedly, I'm not enough of a videophile to be able to say how great it really is, but watching a WMV-HD movie on my 360 is still pretty amazing to me. I don't have the HD DVD add-on, so the only HD content I can compare it to is what I get from cable. In my opinion, the WMV-HD movies look as good, if not better, than cable.

I don't think I ever watched a standard DVD, but that's why I have a standalone upconverting DVD player. I did try out a DivX file yesterday and I thought it actually looked pretty good.

The only thing I still wish it would play is mkv files. I thought I saw somewhere that you could stream them, but I haven't looked into how to do that yet.

englishnamja · « **Reply #11 on:** December 05, 2007, 05:47:00 PM »

wow as a consumer.. using a TV to play my games and movies im not really bothered about this test or how badly it fails.. NO REAL DVD watching movie buff would have considered the xbox 360, xbox etc as DVD movie machines.. if i can put a movie in and it plays.. thats pretty much all i care about as a xbox user.. why not buy one of those high priced 6000$ machines which only play dvd's needs a external amp, and blah blah blah if your looking for test results.. if microsoft can fix that update and make the movies look better then yeah great..!

if your looking for really playing movies on a xbox with the same quality as a dedicated machine(s)
Amp, projector, or dsp lcd 48" - 110" tv, etc..
.. its like trying to compete with a rolls royce, using a hillman imp (google..) with 24k gold engine..although the xbox has a clearly more powerful engine than the dedicated dvd players.. its not built for the same purpose...

Elemino · « **Reply #12 on:** December 05, 2007, 05:29:00 PM »

QUOTE(modistru @ Dec 5 2007, 06:22 PM)

The point is that it IS a DVD player regardless if you use it or not. Although it has been pointed out to be a blatently horrible player, fixing the problems it has have not been addressed (or acknowledged). See the original article for just how bad this player is. Even xbox1's SW player beats its quality. That's just not right. The horsepower exists in there for it to be upsampling/DTS and then some.

You know some cars play DVD's now too... how about we start rating them?

elitegamer360 · « **Reply #13 on:** December 05, 2007, 06:10:00 PM »

This guy is F%$^in proper DUMB he compares the 360 DVD/HD playback with the PS3 Blu-Ray, he forgot that Sony made the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player and Microsft made the 360 as a GAMES CONSOLE. the FIRST reason WE buy the 360 is to play games with it, and the SONY FANs buy the PS3 to watch Blu-Ray movies lol..

Thats reality believe it or not F^%*in IDIOT.

ndiddy · « **Reply #14 on:** December 05, 2007, 06:30:00 PM »

QUOTE

These tests are much simpler, involving simply de-interlacing 1080i content of both regular and film mode content, and noise reduction. It's like nothing is going on there at all.

I don't understand why you would want either of these functions in the HD-DVD player. Any decent HD TV should provide them for you.

Also, almost all HD-DVD's are encoded at 1080p so there is no need to de-interlace the signal at all.

Finally, the noise reduction should be done as close to the end of the signal stream as possible. If you do this before sending the signal through an optional a/v receiver then to the monitor you are just adding an extra step and creating the opportunity for noise to be reintroduced to the signal.

It seems to me like this guy is just looking for an excuse to wine and complain.

Author Topic: Fall Update07: Still a Crummy DVD Player (Read 626 times)