Curious if anyone knows the resolution of the HD movies that Xbox live has for renting? I know my Samsung Samsung HL-T6176S is 1080p and the xbox 360 has a 1080p option, which i leave mine on...

I've heard some games run at 1080p now? I thought this was never going to be the case on 360, or maybe that was HD type discs which are games.

But are the movies natively 720p or 1080p I wonder.

Also.. how does the rental work.. can you watch them over and over, or do you only have so long to watch them before they expire (auto delete?)...

The HD movies on Live are offered in 720P. They look really good and rival the quality of an excellent cable 1080i HD signal. The will auto expire within a preset period of time.

Yeah, they are all 720p. I think you can watch a rented movie as much as you want for a 24 hour period from when you first start it, then it will automatically delete in 14 days if you don't watch it at all.

Yeah, the XBL movies look great aside from a slight drop in framerate.

Sorta side topic.. but.. Does Cable (comcast).. have HD ondemand pay per view movies.. and if so.. anyone know if any of these output Dolby True HD via the HDMI port (assuming you have an HDMI receiver).. giving the 7.1 sound.. I thought I read a few (very few) HD movies now offer True HD. (distinct 7.1 channels).

Curious.. with my Samsung 61" lamp tv.. running xbox 360 at 1080p.. the game of table tennis.. if you play with Jesper.. wearing his yellow shirt.. I see a little bit of a halo outside of the edge of the shirt.. i'm wondering if this is just the game or if my tv settings are off.. or my component cables may be not so hot.. anyone have the game and can check that on their hdtv?

Thanks

The HD movies on Live are offered in 720P. They look really good and rival the quality of an excellent cable 1080i HD signal. The will auto expire within a preset period of time.

I'm thinking of downloading one soon.. i noticed they are around 5.3GB.. how can this be.. as HD-DVDs are usually 30gb and blue ray 50? Are they streaming part of it?

The price is around $6, same as Comcast too.. Haven't checked lately, but have HD Discs made it to local stores yet (IE: blockbuster etc) or even Netflix (same netflix pricing?).

^Not all of the space on HD-dvd or bluray is consumed by video.Lossless audio,supplements etc take lots of space too.And there's some compression for the live HD downloads,which is why they will never be up to the caliber of a blu-ray or HDDVD

I'm thinking of downloading one soon.. i noticed they are around 5.3GB.. how can this be.. as HD-DVDs are usually 30gb and blue ray 50? Are they streaming part of it?

The price is around $6, same as Comcast too.. Haven't checked lately, but have HD Discs made it to local stores yet (IE: blockbuster etc) or even Netflix (same netflix pricing?).

1 - Yes, the D/L's are in the 5-6 GB range.

2 - No, you've been listening to the wrong crowd. ;-) Just because BD holds *up to* 50GB and HD-DVD holds 30+ GB on the disks doesn't mean you *need* that much space for a movie. You would *if* they were only using MPEG2, the way Sony intended, but most HD releases are encoded in the VC-1 CODEC (which is a sibling to WMV-HD) with noticeably better video quality than MPEG2 and significantly better compression. (At some point we might see some releases use H.264 which is almost as good as VC-1). The end result is that a typical 2Hr movie in 1080p/24 HD runs 11-15Gb or thereabouts. Alot of the extra space is then used for disk extras, multiple soundtracks, etc. One way BD uses up the extra space is with uncompressed audio.

3- The XBL D/Ls are, as stated, 720p with 5.1 surround sound and that's it. No extras. So they easily come out at half the size as their disk-based counterparts.

4- The 720p video then gets scaled by the 360 to whatever the display's native resolution is (720, WXGA, 1080, or even ED--although it doesn't make sense to rent HD for ED, not when SD is cheaper) although you get the option of *not* scaling and sending the video ous as pure 720p. If you have a non-overscaned WXGA display that's large enough, that's an option worth checking out, if only to confirm that the upscaling does not degrade the video. Since the 360 uses WMV/VC-1 as its native video format, they have apparently optimized the scaler chip to do very well with it, both in HD and SD.

5- That said, there is a sort-of streaming cheat going on with the video D/L's; the 360 keeps track of the download speed and how much video has come down vs what remains and will present the video as available for viewing before its finished downloading. For SD videos on a good broadband connection this means waiting times of just a few minutes.

6- Finally, you don't have to rent or buy anything to see how the XBL rentals can look on your set-up; there are ample freebies you can D/L. Look into the movie clips area for clips from THE MATRIX. There are also a few free TV show episodes available in HD (Jericho, South Park) and SD. Check it out for yourself; it doesn't cost you anything. ;-)

The downsides compared to HD-DVD or BluRay

1. The sound quality of HD-DVD and BluRay is noticably higher than the xbox downloads though the xbox sound isn't bad by any means.

2. Xbox is 720 where as the HD/Blu are 1080p on most 42" or 50" tv's there isn't much of a quality difference but it is there and the bigger the screen you have the more apparent it wil be.

3. No way to own xbox downloads you get a short rental window and that is it!

4. Not near the amount of titles to choose from as HD/Blu (there are a few that you can download though that aren't available to buy on either format)

So do you guys think the comcast HD movie would look about the same as the Xbox live one? IE: i was thinking of renting 300 on both xbox and comcast to compare.. either way the price is about the same.

I wont run out and buy a hd player of any type till the format wars go away or a good dual player (maybe the new panasonic.. i think it was panasonic) comes around. I am hoping they do more with TrueHD (full 7.1 surround) on both BluRay and HDDVD.. i've heard THD isnt required on blue ray discs and only one player has the ability.. whereas with HDDVD, all players are required to process it. I guess lossless audio is what could suck up that extra 20gb or so available on BluRay if they wanted to make it better..

Frankly, in 10 years everything will be "downloads" or special set top boxes, no need for discs anyway.. if you asked me :)