Peter Near's Blog

XBox

• X'06 Canada

  I went downtown tonight to take part in x'06, the canadian version of the 2006 xbox meetup. They rented out the branthouse, a trendy bar in downtown toronto. There must have been just under 100 xbox 360s set up showing off upcoming games and accessories. I spent most of my time playing with the xbox hd-dvd drive and grilling the microsoft product manager on some of the details. It looks very cool and I was excited to learn that they're pricing it on-par with the us version, or $199 cad. I also got a chance to play some sweet multiplayer gears of war. What a great looking game! They had two booths set up with 4 screens each all battling each other. I got chainsawed in half quite a few times, but got my own kills in too! The evening ended with some draws where they raffled off four limited edition "gears of war" faceplates and the first hd-dvd drive to be released to a consumer. I *really* wanted that hd-dvd drive, but luckily my buddy gary walked away with that prize. I actually walked away with one of the faceplates and got it signed by a couple of the gears of war dev team who were onsite. Capped the evening off by visiting an old open text colleague, nicole, for dinner and a couple of beers. All in all it was a fun night! Posted Oct 18 2006, 08:04 PM by Peter Near with no comments Filed under: XBox

• Getting a 360 to be your extender? Use VGA to connect

  I haven't gotten myself an XBox 360 yet but hope to shortly.  While preparing for the whole shift to the 360 I was doing some research and was shocked to find that the XBox 360 as a DVD player won't output beyond 480p resolution.  You can play games at a higher resolution just fine and use the media center extender to view high-definition televeision, but pop in a DVD and you'll see the resolution ratcheted right down to standard definition.  Due to copy protection requirements, the device was locked down at launch to only output DVDs at standard definition regardless of the connection type or the capability of your display.  This is a requirement of the studios that own the DVD content, and will only allow higher-definition output over connections that support some sort of copy protection.  There is no copy protection available over component cables at 720p, so we're SOL. Now here's the good news.  during an update this spring Microsoft quietly enabled high-definition output of DVDs when you are connected using a VGA cable, and only when you're connected via VGA.  Apparently this is leveraging a loophole in the copy protection guidelines that allows PCs connected to monitors via VGA to upscale the content to match the resolution of the display.  Note that if you're connected via component cables (as most people are) you will still be getting standard-resolution DVD playback even after this update. If you're anything like me, you had planned on using your XBox 360 both as a media center extender and as a DVD player.  In this case, it looks like your best bet is to purchase a VGA video cable for the XBox 360 in order to make the best use of your home theater system.  I'm lucky, my new Samsung HDTV has a VGA input so it should all "just work". Posted Aug 28 2006, 08:04 PM by Peter Near with no comments Filed under: Extenders, XBox