Fall Update07: Still a Crummy DVD Player

December 6th, 2007, 18:04 Posted By: wraggster

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.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...129TX1K0000532

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