Whatever happened to that? I read that the xbox a/v team was working on it, but its been quite a few months now. Are they going to bundle it with one of seasonal updates or something? Have they tried, failed, and scrapped that project?

If you haven't already, try looking in the HD DVD player forum. There is a thread there concerning this very topic. It's currently on the second page, I think. It's called DTS output coming to the 360, or something like that.

BourbonNcigars

i'll save you the trouble of looking by giving you an update: "its coming" is all you'll read...

when? "it's coming"...

they've been saying this since november...

No talbain... since November they have been saying "it's coming soon".

It better include a lot of options for setting up the HD-DVD section as well as the audio fix.

According to that Microsoft insider in one of those insider threads, there is an update coming in mid-spring that includes DTS output and lots of bug fixes.

I never noticed until last night that the box that the HD-DVD drive came in has a DTS symbol printed on the side of the box. Why in the world didn't they have DTS enabled from the get go?

DTS is enabled for SD DVD. There is a problem with the decoding of DD+ soundtracks on HD DVD's with the 360. One of the options that Toshiba offers on its players is when outputting audio via SPDIF, you can choose to have the DD+ downmixed (must do this b/c SPDIF has insufficient bandwidth for high-rez audio) to DTS instead of DD.

The reason for doing so is the DTS has a higher spec, 1.5m I believe, as opposed to the lesser 640kbps of DD.

Supposedly this is what M$ is going to mimic w/ the FW update.

Whether it makes a huge difference between downmixing to DTS as opposed to DD is debatable.

I'd prefer they just fix the problem with the DD+ to DD conversion and I'd be happy with that.

I noticed that on the HDVD version of Sleepy Hollow if you select the DTS track the output is still DD.

The hd-dvd update must be part of a general 360 update so it can't come before the next major update by the Xbox team.

Amir is VP at MS over area responsible for hd-dvd and has said they are including other hd-dvd audio improvements/fixes along with the DTS.

Here is Amir's quote for those of you that don't venture over to the hd-dvd sections:


"We plan on shipping an update to the Xbox 360 HD DVD player in early to mid spring. In this update we will be adding DTS output, improved Audio, and improved title compatibility."

The variability there is that this is a software project and we are fixing/enhancing a lot of things and we want to make sure we get them right. So it is difficult to give an exact day for the update. First day of spring is March 20th I believe so that should give you some prespective on the approximate release date.

Let me again apologize for how hard it has been to get you some information on this update.

__________________
Amir
Microsoft (HD DVD insider)
VC-1 video codec insider in BD/HD DVD
Ask me questions about HD DVD here

Its about time they give an "approximate" date.

No talbain... since November they have been saying "it's coming soon".



HAHA! You made me spill my coffee this morning :-)