Awww an anti-XBOT newbie... welcome on the forum ! 

I asked myself the same question as soon as I saw the HD movies on Xbox Live marketplace. They were like 6GB in 720p with 5.1 sound. I thought how this could be possible, but I tried it so I can form my own opinion. Well, the picture quality for Batman Dark Knight was VERY impressive.

I do own some HD-DVDs which I bought for 4€ / movie after HD-DVD was dead and the quality was almost the same. I was impressed. Even my father said that this looks very good. I do not give a *beeep* about bitrate etc etc as long as the result is as good as it is.

You should go ahead and just give it a try. When you get your Xbox 360 buy / rent 2 or 3 movies and make your own decision. Hopefully you will be impressed, too.

i wish i could buy/rent and use this zune HD service but i live in germany so i'm not sure if i ever get that sevice for xbox, as its only possible in USA so far i think

I believe Germany was listed as well during the MS annoucement at E3.

Ich weiß nicht in welchem Teil von Deutschland du wohnst, aber in Hamburg funktioniert es. Und ja, das soll nach Deutschland kommen.

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I just told him I am from Germany, too.

@DirtyP

Wird Sie kaufen Left 4 Dead 2 ja?

I'll explain :)

But first can mods ban about 6-7 fuckers in this thread who are PS3 fanboy trolls making a nuisance of themselves.

Here is why...

1. Bluray "standard" follows a set of rules so that the full benefits of the codec aren't used to get the best compression possible.

2. Bluray has multiple audio streams usually at least 1 is lossless taking around 3-4mbit on it's own just for the lossless audio whith the difference only being audible on VERY high end setups.

3. Codecs have advanced since bluray was released and the Xbox 360 has much more processing power than a normal bluray player to be able to use the advanced features of the codec.

4. Generally instead of h264 or MPEG4-AVC as it's often called, the Xbox 360 will be using the VC1 for encoding, this is highly optimised in certain low bitrate situations - it is an inferior codec at high bitrates however. Go check out some old HD-DVDs for example that use VC1. They manage to "cram" an entire movie on a 15GB disc with multiple audio streams and extras. This is with *older* implementations of the codec from a couple of years ago even.

5. The quality will not be as good as bluray at it's maximum potential of course, but it will be VERY close, you will not notice the difference on any set less than 50-60inches and only on films that needed a high bitrate in the first place - e.g very old films that have lots of grain and print damage, this takes a lot of space to look good.

6. The films on the service will mostly be NEW films that compress very well and don't need ridiculously high bitrates to look good because they are shot on digital cameras etc.

7. VC1 handles grain much better than h264 in any case.

Finally, believe what you will but the proof is in the pudding and it's funny reading the ignorant comments from a lot of the wankers in this thread who I'm sorry to say shouldn't be given the stand to make such stupid remarks purely in the name of being a fanboy and to rubbish anything MS does.

If you have a geuine well thought out comment that is critical then thats cool. The shit in this thread isn't.

3.

^^Excellent post.

Just some quick questions:

How does the bluray standard not allow you to use the features of VC1 or h.264 to their best extent?

How have either VC1 or h.264 advanced since they were released? Unless you mean encoding tools/practises. I know that h.265 is being worked on, but that is hardly applicable.

I always thought the "VC1 is better at lower bitrates"-thing was a myth, could you explain?

Point 6: It really depends on the source material, yes, but that goes for newer movies as well.

Point 7: This I'm almost completely sure is a myth. H.264 is a wider used format, which leads to more amateurs fucking up the video in the encoding process, but I can see no reason why it would be worse than VC1.

Acutally it is "Werden Sie Left 4 Dead 2 kaufen?"

Ja, ich werde Left 4 Dead 2 kaufen! I got it on pre-order.