Now that you’ll be connected to Live all the time, regardless of what game you’re playing or even if you’re watching a DVD, it’s sort of seperated from the “if a game is online” bit.
Wait, why am I going to be connected to Live all the time? I probably won’t even get Xbox Live. Is it required for the 360?
No. All XB360 users get a free membership in Xbox Live Silver, which basically means you get free chat, lobbies, downloads, and access to the public areas of Live. About the only thing you don’t get is the ability to actually play online games… that’s what you pay for.
Sounds like a win to me, since I don’t actually play online, but I would like to get all the freebies…
Cheers!
Rob
I have absolutely NO inside info on the X360 at this point that isn’t publicly available. So please don’t take any of these comments as meaning anything, really.
But… it seems to me that at the end of the day, if watching movies at higher than DVD quality becomes important there are a number of ways to solve this problem technologically. Remember that for many people who are getting an HDTV, an ordinary progressive scan DVD player is a big upgrade in the quality of their existing DVD collection).
So the issue isn’t whether your HDTV can display “super-DVD” content, or whether your HDTV can display it (presumably people who care have to have a format like 1080i or something that would actually be better than progressive DVD), or whether the X360 can output content of that quality (which it clearly can).
The only issue would be storage media. Ie, presumably super-DVD content requires more bits than fit on a DVD.
However, there are two obvious ways around this to me who has given it basically zero deep thought, so I’m sure better solutions exist.
Improve video encoding techniques so that “super-DVD” content can fit on a regular DVD, with the right processor-intensive decoding technology. Hey, strangely enough your X360 has 3 high powered cores just waiting to do something like that.
Get the bits through a medium other than your DVD drive. For example, downloading it via Xbox Live. Ok, the infrastructure isn’t there right now to download many gigs of data to your X360 in a timely fashion, but that is something that could change.
Obviously there are a ton of marketing issues surrounding this (like, presumably people aren’t making X360-specific versions of movies, primarily, although that hasn’t stopped UMDs). But I don’t think it’s cut and dried that the existence of Blu-Ray on PS3 means that Sony has a lock on better-than-DVD playback.
Both next-gen high definition formats, blu-ray and HD-DVD, require mpeg4/wmv9 compression in the specs. They doesn’t use mpeg-2 like DVDs. It’s certainly conceivable that a better than mpeg-4 video compression codec will be developed, in fact it’s likely that such a thing will happen eventually. But just to give you some idea, a 25GB single layer blu-ray disk with mpeg-4 compression can hold roughly 2 hours of reference quality 720p video, plus/minus due to variable bitrate encoding. That’s 12.5GB per hour.
Is there any reason why you couldn’t put 720p video on a DVD? Of course not. But quality would have to be significantly degraded to fit a movie, even with modern magic mpeg4/H.264/AVC/xvid/VC1/wmv9 level compression. HD is just a lot of pixels, there’s no getting around it.
The market is going to pick the nextgen format and all others will be as worthless as betamax. But the choice will be between blu-ray and HD-DVD. MPEG-4 compressed DVD’s won’t even be a contender. The comparison to UMD is apt. Who gives a shit about UMD?
No kidding? Many popular films are already over 2 hours, and 720p isn’t even the highest HDTV resolution. In that case, HD-DVD with its maximum capacity of 30 GB is stillborn anyway, isn’t it?
Actually, both formats require not just MPEG-4, but H.264 specifically. MPEG4 has two “main” video encoding standards. ASP is the simple profile, H.263, and it’s slightly better than MPEG2 quality and cheap and easy to decode. It’s optimized for small screens and very low bitrates, like on cell phone networks (in those situations it’s much better than MPEG-2). H.264 is an awesome compression scheme, equal or better than WMV-9. But it takes freaking forever to ENCODE, and is very CPU intensive to DECODE as well. For that matter, WMV9 is expensive to decode, when you’re talking about 1280x720 pixels per frame.
But just to give you some idea, a 25GB single layer blu-ray disk with mpeg-4 compression can hold roughly 2 hours of reference quality 720p video, plus/minus due to variable bitrate encoding. That’s 12.5GB per hour.
Yeah, but that’s “reference quality” and you can pretty much guarantee that nobody will use such a high bitrate. With either WMV9 or H.264, you can get really excellent quality (we’re talking less artifacting than really well-encoded, high bitrate DVD) at 720p resolution in about 12-15 megabits per second, with 5.1 audio. Let’s say 16 megabits to make the math easy: that’s 2 megabytes per second, or 120 megabytes per minute. That’s just over 7 gigs per hour, or about four hours of video and 5.1 audio per 25GB disc.
Note that using MPEG-2, the ATSC HDTV standard allows for 21 megabits for video and audio, and a good ATSC signal looks GREAT. Sadly, hi-def cable and sattelite guys are crunching down the bitrate BIG time (to less than 10!) using MPEG-2 still, so the quality of HDTV on cable or sattelite is almost always inferior to over-the-air. So really great quality HD can be had in 21 megabits with MPEG-2, it’s easy to see how you can have even superior quality in less bitrate with H.264 or WMV9.
Is there any reason why you couldn’t put 720p video on a DVD? Of course not. But quality would have to be significantly degraded to fit a movie, even with modern magic mpeg4/H.264/AVC/xvid/VC1/wmv9 level compression. HD is just a lot of pixels, there’s no getting around it.
I would encourage you to go watch any of these clips:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/content_provider/film/ContentShowcase.aspx
Or buy the Terminator 2 “Extreme Edition” DVD, or Step Into Liquid or Coral Reef Adventure… all with 720p movies that fit on a DVD.
The market is going to pick the nextgen format and all others will be as worthless as betamax. But the choice will be between blu-ray and HD-DVD. MPEG-4 compressed DVD’s won’t even be a contender. The comparison to UMD is apt. Who gives a shit about UMD?
This, I agree with. It is technically possible to use WMV9 (also knows as VC-1) to put a full 720p movie on a 9GB disc, with really quite good quality and 5.1 sound. Doesn’t leave much room for special bonus features or alternate audio tracks, though. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray both have plenty of space to do all that, regardless of the pissing match between them over maximum storage capacity.
[quote=“RepoMan”]
No. All XB360 users get a free membership in Xbox Live Silver, which basically means you get free chat, lobbies, downloads, and access to the public areas of Live. About the only thing you don’t get is the ability to actually play online games… that’s what you pay for.
Sounds like a win to me, since I don’t actually play online, but I would like to get all the freebies…
Cheers!
Rob[/quote]
Yeah, if they’d pay for the whateveryoucallit I would need to hook my Xbox to my wireless network, I’d be a winner too. Maybe that thing is cheaper now. Previously, the cost of Live and cost of the hardware thing combined with no games we really wanted to play online was a no-go for Live.
And just to preempt the usual question, no, I can’t really use a wired connection to hook it to my router. I’m not going to string cable through my house to get my console online. TV downstairs, computer and routers upstairs.
Put the router and cable modem at your TV and get a $20/30 wireless network card for your PC.
–Dave
We have DSL, not cable. I’m not sure if we could move the DSL modem downstairs to the TV – the jack for the DSL modem is in the room with the computers. I’d need a compelling reason to upset the current scheme, which works. If that kind of reason presented itself, I’d probably just buy the wireless doohickey for the Xbox.
What I heard from the manager of the local Gamestop is that at some point, Sony has said that the PS3 isn’t going to launch at $399.
They way he talked, Sony implied that the PS3 is going to be a “total home entertainment system” and as such would carry a much higher price tag than the X360.
I think he said something like the $600-700 range.
They had supposedly said that “we know that there won’t be a PS3 in every home”.
And, that Sony was ok with that.
All that you can really do is wait and see.
We have DSL, not cable. I’m not sure if we could move the DSL modem downstairs to the TV – the jack for the DSL modem is in the room with the computers. I’d need a compelling reason to upset the current scheme, which works. If that kind of reason presented itself, I’d probably just buy the wireless doohickey for the Xbox.[/quote]
I had a similar setup in my old house. I got a wireless access point, which allowed wireless access all over the house (it was a small townhouse) then put a wireless bridge by the TV, and plugged all the consoles into that. In the end I played one PS2 game online, and that was it. A bit of a waste of money, but I enjoyed the geekery aspect :)
I find this hard to believe. If Sony launched at $600-700 it’s likely that they would cede the videogame market to Microsoft and Nintendo.
A more likely scenario is several different PS3s – one that is just games at $399 (or cheaper if they can do it) and one that is the total system for $600-700.
I think Sony is blowing smoke. It will likely be no more than $399.99 and they’re simply making everyone think it’s going to be this incredibly powerful thing that is just so worth the money and Sony is so awesome for cutting everyone a break on the price and blah blah… it’s great PR.
–Dave
They did about the same thing with the PSP, letting the analysts talk up the value of the components and estimate a $300-$400 price tag.