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Originally Posted by Razor05
As per TeamXbox:
HD DVD: The Real Xbox 360 Killing Application
By: César A. Berardini - "Cesar"
Nov. 8th, 2006 8:24 am
When you open the tray of the new Xbox 360 HD DVD player and put a movie to witness the outstanding visuals and sound that high definition movies have to offer, you don’t know how much it takes for those beautiful colors and realistic sounds to invade your living room.
Contrary to home players from manufacturers such as Toshiba, the Xbox 360 HD DVD player is basically a HD DVD drive that can be sold at only $199.99 ($300 less than the cheapest HD DVD player) because it uses the Xbox 360 hardware to decode the HD content.
For this reason, Microsoft had to develop all the software that will use the Xbox 360 innards to decode the HD DVD movies, making the actual external HD DVD player just a part of the equation.
Luckily for us, a member of the Xbox Platform development team took the time to share some of the details in the creation of the application that makes possible HD DVD on the Xbox 360.
Shaheen Gandhi, a Microsoft software engineer, revealed that it took “4.7 million lines of code, partner teams from all over Microsoft, and millions of dollars” to create the Xbox 360 HD DVD solution.
Although code for the codecs used by the HD DVD standard were available at Microsoft, they were all optimized for x86 architecture used on most personal computers; but, since the Xbox 360 CPU is a PowerPC chip, they had to re-write all codecs to take advantage of this architecture.
"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."
Gandhi also revealed that so far, the HD DVD application is the only one that takes 100% of the hardware resources, all the time:
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).
Now you know that the next time you enjoy a HD DVD movie on the Xbox 360, there were lot of people involved to make this happen and it took as much as making the Xbox 360 itself.
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