360 Fall 2006 Software Update: HDTV Devolved (CTOForADay.com)

Microsoft has just pushed out its Fall 2006 dashboard update; in so doing, it has clarified its definition of what HDTV means as it applies to the XBOX 360.

What's in: 1080p, 1920x1080 over VGA, 50hz HDTV modes for DVD and HD DVD, and more.

What's not: Display modes for native HDTVs out there whose resolution is between 720p and 1080p, 50hz modes for anything other than DVD and HD DVD playback, 16:10 displays, poor HD audio support when watching DVDs and HD-DVDs, and more.

For what it's worth, this update really could be titled "Microsoft fails to add support for high-end HDTV to the 360"; the real world really is that far from the standard. It's unfortunate that Microsoft didn't recognize that.

From time to time, this article assumes that you've read the previous article, 360 HD Support: HDTV Evolved, and/or are familiar with some of the problems the 360 has had with HDTVs in the past.

HDTV - A Historical Primer

HDTV as we see it today is the result of many years of "cooperation" of a large number of interested parties, each with extensive existing investments, constraints on upgrade cost, requirements on technical delivery, etc., and what compromises each of them was live with; the complexity of HDTV is a direct result of the conflicts that arose. Consumers wanted simplicity, technologists pushed higher resolutions. Manufacturers' needed to produce products at the low and midrange and not just the high-end. Content producers' and broadcasters' didn't want to throw away millions of investment in the physical infrastructure of the television and movie industry. And all of this stuff was intended to be shown over the air - so it had to cover the physical difficulties and constraints in delivering UHF/VHF broaband signals in Japan, Europe, and the U.S., in analog. Some of the most limiting factors centered around the need to squeeze the entire HDTV signal for a channel into the spaces that weren't in use by the standard broadcast; an HD piggyback, where the tiny ant of the ordinary TV data carries on its back the whole of the picnic basket of data for the HD.

Years pased while HDTV's specification congealed. And while it did, the world went digital, but HDTV had its brains mired in analog - conceived for analog delivery and CRT tubes that changed their display resolution using magnets and a beam. Suddenly, cable networks moved from analog to digital. Digital satellite TV took off and killed analog satellite broadcasting. Then digital terrestrial happened, and began paving the way for the shutdown of the analog signals that had incurred so many of the restrictions that caused the whole process to have become complicated in the first place. And then even our televisions went digital, voiding the premise that HDTV built itself on - display lines and resolution switching.

And so HDTV is riddled with the affectations of its former life in analog and made more difficult by the limitations of the newer technology we're now trying to use this stuff on. The whole argument over component cables, DVI, HDCP, HDMI, etc. - they're all the physical sign of the difficulties that the HDTV developers have had in keeping up with the rate of change in the market; by the time HDTV was done and ready, the market hadn't just shifted, it'd had earthquakes, landslides.

The authors of the standard didn't have any clear picture of what "HDTV", meant then.They each argued for their own exceptions to the rule, their own capabilities pushed into the forefront. And because of that, for the most part, we don't have any clear idea of what it really means now.

Supported Resolutions: Component HD

English HDTV lists 4 entries, now: 480p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p.

Japanese support includes D2 (525p/480p), D3 (1125i/1080i), D4 (750p/720p), and D5 (1125p/1080p).

Note how the japanese edition lists not only the straightforward, common HDTV resolutions on the right, but the japanese MUSE system equivalents on the left, which count the total number of lines, including overscan, within the signal, and not just the active display (the 480 part). So, in all of the above the active display area remains its HDTV counterpart, but the signal is compabile with sites that support the MUSE equivalent resolutions.

Mommy, It Hertz

This of course is all made more complicated by the actual display frequency - 50/60hz. So a 1080i, 60hz display is written as 1080/60i, in many cases. On the 360, you'll have a separate area where you can select 50hz/60hz modes. There's a well known, and stupid whereby people start out with non-component mode, set up their system for 50hz, later upgrade to an HDTV, and find that their 360 no longer works - even though you moved to HDTV, where 50hz was unsupported, it remembered and tried to apply the 50hz mode; result? Expensive box with shiny new TV = frustration because programmer got lazy. This release allows you to view DVD and HD DVD content that was created for 50hz content by adding support for 50hz HDTV modes, but only when viewing DVD and HD DVD content. That problem? Not gone yet. But they've fixed it for content that's outside of their control - if the HD DVD says 50Hz PAL, then your screen will get a 50Hz PAL signal as the content intended.

Of course, it's still broken when it comes to anything other than DVD and HD DVD, so that fix is really a red herring. If you've got a display that doesn't support the 60hz mode, being able to watch DVDs when you bought a game system isn't much of a consolation prize. This isn't nonexistent - there are PAL HDTV LCD and plasma systems for sale in Europe right now - and your 360 isn't going to work with it in HD resolution.

Supported Resolutions: VGA

VGA lists 8 entries: 640x480, 848x480, 1024x768, 1280x720, 1280x768, 1280x1024, 1360x768, 1920x1080.

So, a great deal of the LCD HDTVs out there, the bulk in fact, are neither 720p or 1080p. For the rest of us, there's VGA - our one shot at getting a proper image out of this thing. For that to happen, Microsoft would have to add resolutions for those televisions: 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, and 1920x1200. But that didn't happen.

Instead, we're still stuck in distortion-land. No 16:10 resolutions supported, so all of are images are squished in the wrong directions. Our native resolutions aren't supported, so our HDTV systems are producing artifacts as they scale an image that the 360 scaled already, producing scaling artifacts and degrading picture quality.

Conclusion

Microsoft had the chance to add support for the large number of televisions out there that didn't have native 1080p, and improve its European support. For most of us, nothing has changed, our televisions continue to introduce lag between game and screen as it rescales the scaled images produced by the 360. For many Europeans who've splashed out on big-screen plasma HD systems, they're stuck in low-res SD land because there's no support for 50hz HDTV gaming. The failure is made all the worse by the shortsightedness of it all; the capability is clearly there, but the product managements' awareness of the market is absent.

The Kitchen Sink

A number of other features, a plethora in fact, are included in the fall update. These include items in the following categories:

Things to bring feature parity and improve reviews when placed head to head against the about-to-be-released consoles from Sony and Nintendo;
Things to make the 360's localization support less god-awful;
Things to support new products they want you to buy from them (headsets, wheels, cameras, HD DVD players, and the Zune, for starters);
things that make the user interface squeeze more stuff into less physical real-estate. Note this does not include reducing the amount of advertising you're forced to watch, even on your XBOX Live Gold I-pay-to-watch-ads account (we are sheeple);
things to make XBOX Live Arcade suck less if you have lots of titles;
things that make the store suck less;
things that they have to do because visa and mastercard are twisting their arm;
things to make video playback suck less;
things to make DVD and HD DVD playback do the stuff that DVD players everywhere else have done for 10 years;
things to make it integrate more tightly and completely with Windows;
things to fix 360's wired and wireless networking support with specific hardware or specific situations it didn't do very well in;
things to help manage the fact that storage space is at a premium on most 360's because the hard drives are either not present at all or too small for the un-planned-for-usage they're now getting, as well as because the 360's file management, on the whole, sucks rocks. (Note, this is not a fix for the fact that storage management sucks on the 360; we can perhaps hpoe for that in a future update).

Finding what you're looking for in the 'complete list' is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, but where someone has cleverly put the needle in a hay costume to dress it up. Also note the clever mass-replace of the word "fixed" for "improved". I hope that the 360 marketing team gets their nether regions bitten off by someone who turns to them while they scream in agony, smiles, and says "all for another taste of that ludicrously tasty crunchy nut."

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