Most people have most likely considered it an easy task to connect an external HD DVD player and that the support for the new blue-laser format would then be secured for Xbox 360. However, it seems it was considerably harder than that as a blog by Xbox 360 developers has revealed that they had to put in 4.7 million lines of extra code only to make the external HD DVD player work. A reason for this is that Microsoft has coded the support for HD DVD so that the console’s triple-core processor will handle all of the rendering and heavy calculations which is a part of HD DVD playback.
“All 6 of Xbox 360’s hardware threads are hard at work while playing back an HD DVD. At the moment, the player software pushes Xbox 360 harder than any other (save, perhaps, Gears of War during some particularly busy parts of the game).”
In other words, Xbox 360 will be able to build up a real nice sweat when it’s used as a HD DVD player, the question is if and how much effect the increased load will have on the level of noise and as the noise isn’t exactly little already during idle we’re a bit unsettled about this. We’re eager to read the first reviews of Xbox 360’s external HD DVD player, but until then you read on at Xbox Team’s blog.
