Xbox 360 HD-DVD Interview

[H]ard Console has an interview up today featuring the member of the Xbox Console and Consumer Software team. It gives pretty interesting detail on HD DVD add-on. Just as a reminder, the Xbox 360 add-on player can be used with PCs. For less then two hundred dollars, you can enable your HTPC to be a high def DVD player.

From the article:

What is the difference, technically, between DVD and HD-DVD?

My analogy for HD DVD is: If DVD is video with some navigation information, HD DVD is a runtime environment where a major feature is audio/video playback. HD DVD is a completely different beast from DVD. All the original DVD stuff changed: file formats, DRM schemes, etc. Of course, the most visible difference is that HD DVD uses HD content – six times the video resolution of regular DVD.

Interactivity is completely new for a movie playback experience. Picture in picture, menus during playback, etc. is all new technology that was spec’d out by the DVD forum.