Quote:
Originally Posted by Gser
On paper yes. The xbox360 profile in MeGUI uses 24Mbps but I sometimes got choppy playback with that. Its astonishing that they didn't have the forethought to include a hardware decoder. Maybe the inclusion of high profile to h.264 in 03/2005 was too near to launch or Microsoft put all of its bets on VC-1. It very much seems like the whole video playback issue was an afterthought because it didn't have HDMI either. What I'm furious about is that it didn't support AC3 playback for files.
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The cost of a H.264 1080i/p ASIC would have pushed the price of a game console back then (Blu-ray and HD DVD launched quite a while after the 360, and at higher price points). It wasn't just a block on the GPUs of the era. HDMI was also quite new. Recall the PS3 came out quite a while after the 360, at a higher price point, and with lower game performance. The PS3 was much more focused on media originally, although that changed over the life of the 360.
The AC3 playback for files was because the console had to decode add system audio, and reencode. A passthrough mode of files would have disabled all other audio.
Reencoding to 640 Kbps AC-3 was essentially lossless in any case. The lack of support for 5.1 PCM output was my big frustration. I had a proposal for the "Xbox 365" that would have had an integrated HD DVD player, ASIC decoder, PCM audio out, and could disable the latency adding module that emulated the original multichip performance. It would have used 3-layer discs; two layers for DVD-9 and one of HD-DVD 15. Games could be optimized for 365 and access better textures and audio, while preserving perfect backwards compatibility.
Kinda like the Xbox One X conceptually. But, it obviously went nowhere. I don't mind not working at Microsoft anymore
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