My friend is set on the fact that DVD-9 can't support 1080p. That it takes a format like HD-DVD or Blu-Ray to do so. He only says this because he works at Circuit City and is convinced that he is always right, and that anyone else is wrong.

He says that it can only support 720p and not 1080p. I will admit that on his HDTV the games look jagged, but i told him it's because component doesn't support full HD. And that he should either get a Xbox 360 that has HDMI or go to a 720p resolution. Or get a better HDTV since the TV only supports 720p.

What do you guys say? Is he right? Or can you give me some hard facts on why he's wrong? Thanks.

By the way, he's not a Sony fanboy. He hates the system and love the Xbox. Always has.

My friend is set on the fact that DVD-9 can't support 1080p. That it takes a format like HD-DVD or Blu-Ray to do so. He only says this because he works at Circuit City and is convinced that he is always right, and that anyone else is wrong.

He says that it can only support 720p and not 1080p. I will admit that on his HDTV the games look jagged, but i told him it's because component doesn't support full HD. And that he should either get a Xbox 360 that has HDMI or go to a 720p resolution. Or get a better HDTV since the TV only supports 720p.

What do you guys say? Is he right? Or can you give me some hard facts on why he's wrong? Thanks.

By the way, he's not a Sony fanboy. He hates the system and love the Xbox. Always has.

A few things:
1) For games, the amount of storage isn't the limiting factor on the resolution of the game. It mostly limits the amount of hi-def video (i.e. pre-rendered cutscenes) that can be stored. A great deal of games now are handling cutscenes realtime using the game engine, so that helps cut down on storage space concerns. Whether the game itself displays in 1080p is completely up to what resolution the game console renders at, not what disc format it uses. The Xbox 360 uses DVD-9 discs for games and can still output at 1080p.

2) Most games, however, render internally at 720p on the 360 and are then scaled up to 1080p on the fly by the 360's ANA scaler chip (or the H-ANA chip on HDMI models). The render resolution is limited by several factors, including the number of effects or shaders the developers want to use. For instance, Halo 3 actually renders LOWER than 720p - somewhere near 600 lines of resolution - because it is also performing two render passes for HDR lighting. The 360 then scales this 600 lines to 720p/1080i/1080p as needed.

3) For video/movies, DVD-9 would require a lot of compression to hold HD video, but it can be done. There's nothing inherent to the format that prevents you from putting HD video on a DVD-9 (and in fact pirates are ripping Blu-ray/HD-DVD and encoding to DVD for DivX playback with pretty solid results). The drawback is simply the amount of space. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have enough space to hold HD video with low enough compression levels to prevent visible artifacts.

4) Component video can and does support 1080p capability, though some TV sets wouldn't accept 1080p feeds. There's this huge misconception that component somehow isn't "full HD", but it's untrue. The primary difference between component video and HDMI as far as video quality is A) HDMI transmits digitally, component is analog; and B) HDMI takes your display's analog color decoding out of the equation, whereas component video uses it to get proper levels of red, green and blue (HDMI doesn't need this because colors are sent as digital values). You won't inherently notice more or less jaggies on one or the other - that's related more to whether your game console is performing anti-aliasing. Tweaking your set with a calibration DVD can go a long way to minimize the differences between the two, and on a calibrated set you would be hard pressed to tell a difference between component and HDMI.

5) If the TV is 720p native, you should set your 360 to 720p. Any scaling the TV has to do increases the chance of visible artifacts, which could result in jaggies. If the TV is a resolution slightly off from the 720p/1080p standard, pick the one it is closest to. If you take the above example of Halo 3 and you had your 360 set to 1080p output to a 720p TV, you are essentially scaling from 600 lines of resolution up to 1080 lines, then back down to 720 at the set. You would essentially be undoing any anti-aliasing done by the 360 and reducing visual quality.

A DVD-9 can hold 1080p video, just not a lot of it. Anything can hold and play 1080p video such as a flash drive, a memory stick, you name it. 1080p is just data like anything else.

Grab a 1080p WMV file off the internet, burn it to a DVD and pop it into his Xbox. It will play like a charm. If he has a 1080p tv that is..

My friend is set on the fact that DVD-9 can't support 1080p. That it takes a format like HD-DVD or Blu-Ray to do so. He only says this because he works at Circuit City and is convinced that he is always right, and that anyone else is wrong. He says that it can only support 720p and not 1080p. I will admit that on his HDTV the games look jagged, but i told him it's because component doesn't support full HD. And that he should either get a Xbox 360 that has HDMI or go to a 720p resolution. Or get a better HDTV since the TV only supports 720p. What do you guys say? Is he right? Or can you give me some hard facts on why he's wrong? Thanks.

By the way, he's not a Sony fanboy. He hates the system and love the Xbox. Always has.

If you friend is not a Sony Sissy then what is his motivation for perpetuating lies and false information? Your friend is wrong. You can do a search in this xbox forum and find several threads on this topic. It has already been discussed a few times before.

What reason does he give supporting his misguided theory that the DVD-9 spec cannot support a high resolution? Yikes. Perhaps he should find another occupation. He is obviously not doing his homework. :)

DVDs of whatever breed are just repositories for binary data. The type and format of the content encoded in the binary data is irrelevant. It can be low-res video or it can be high res; "bits-is-bits".
While DVD-9 can't hold 2-plus hours of 1080p video on a single disk, like the blue-laser formats, their capacity and transfer transfer rate is fine for shorter duration videos at a full 1080p as long as they're encoded with advanced video and audio codecs and not the last gen (and space-wasteful) MPEG2 codec, like the early releases of a certain nameless blue-laser format.
As a matter of fact, given the very high cost of blue-laser burners annd media, using red-laser DVD-9 disks to hold HD video up to 1080p is a *standard* feature of all current video-authoring suites from Pinnacle, Cyberlink, Roxio, et al. Very useful for PC archiving and viewing of home video generated with the current-gen HD camcorders. The disks work fine on all HD-DVD players and some BD-Players, too. All of which Circuit City sells.
So your pal ought to bone up on the software and hardware he is selling before he costs his employer sales and finds himself back on the street where they picked him up from.
Just a friendly warning. >;-)

You could fit 1080p material on a burned CD. Just not very much of it.

My friend is set on the fact that DVD-9 can't support 1080p. That it takes a format like HD-DVD or Blu-Ray to do so. He only says this because he works at Circuit City and is convinced that he is always right, and that anyone else is wrong.It just goes to show why you shouldn't rely on the sales 'droids at a big-box store when you go to make a purchase...

Well, no one should expect Circuit City employees to know what they're talking about. They're just SELLING the stuff, not actually installing it, so they rely on whatever nuggets of PR fluff they're fed.

To me, it's like this: There's a guy whose job it is to deliver bread to my local grocery store. That's his specialty - it's what he knows. Now, if I have general questions about bread, that guy might know a little bit about bread just because it's what he does. But if I want to know how to make bread, his answer, while enlightened by his typical involvement with bread, won't be completely accurate... nor should I expect it to be. I also wouldn't ask the guy how to make a given sandwich just because he deals with bread all day.

Y'know, in hindsight, I went way too far with that analogy. Maybe I should have just said, "Circuit City employees know jack dick" and left it at that. :D

Y'know, in hindsight, I went way too far with that analogy. Maybe I should have just said, "Circuit City employees know jack dick" and left it at that. :DHey... I liked your bread delivery guy analogy! I think it actually explains the circumstances in a way that makes sense.

Hey... I liked your bread delivery guy analogy! I think it actually explains the circumstances in a way that makes sense.

...although anytime you can use the phrase "jack dick" to describe someone, you just need to do it.

While DVD-9 can't hold 2-plus hours of 1080p video on a single disk, like the blue-laser formats, their capacity and transfer transfer rate is fine for shorter duration videos at a full 1080p as long as they're encoded with advanced video and audio codecs and not the last gen (and space-wasteful) MPEG2 codec, like the early releases of a certain nameless blue-laser format.

I've seen 1080p video encoded at bit rates that would allow it to fit on a DVD-9, and it looks pretty damn good. Better than broadcast HD (assuming that it's using an mpeg4 codec).

I've seen 1080p video encoded at bit rates that would allow it to fit on a DVD-9, and it looks pretty damn good. Better than broadcast HD (assuming that it's using an mpeg4 codec).

Or VC-1.
In fact you can download tons of clips all over the place, in either H.264 or WMV/VC1 that prove the point. Its easy and common. That's what makes it so hilariously off the mark to say you need a blue-laser disk.

He says that it can only support 720p and not 1080p. I will admit that on his HDTV the games look jagged, but i told him it's because component doesn't support full HD. And that he should either get a Xbox 360 that has HDMI or go to a 720p resolution. Or get a better HDTV since the TV only supports 720p.

You are both wrong. ;)

Component does support "full HD" 1080p, HDMI doesn't offer anything more in regard to gaming resolutions. However, the vast majority of 360 games are drawn at resolutions far lower than 1080p, and simply upscaled to that resolution when it is selected for output. Regardless. even a game rendered at 1080p will look jaggy on a decent display if you are sitting close enough to see the jaggies.

As for the actual resolution games are drawn at, that is in no way limited by the ammount of content which can fit on the storage medium, but rather by ablities of the hardware that draws the images. For instance, I'm not aware of any 1080p XBLA games off hand, but but there are native 1080p 360 games such as Virtual Tennis 3. Futhermore, Blast Factor on the PS3 supports native 1080p and is less than 100MB, which means one could almost a hundred of copies of that game on a single DVD-9.