[aidanbrowne]

Its probably obvious to most but anyhoooo......
Thinking of buying a hddvd add on for my 360, but two things:
My 360 doesnt have hdmi port does the component cable that comes as standard with the pro support 720p or is it just 1080i?
Do I need to buy any other cable to get surround sound or does that all go through the component cable?

Thanks in advance

[aidanbrowne]

ok shud have read faq first, i assume my first question is answered with a no. I need a vga cable but my tv only goes to 720p so will this be fine for both games and hd movies?

[thommcghome]

For HD DVD playback Component supports both 720P & 1080I, but not 1080P. VGA supports up to 1080P & also allows upscaling of regular DVDs; Component does not.

& as per my response in another thread;

http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archi...gence-day.aspx
The 360 player software decodes all the above codecs [Dolby Digital+, DTS, TrueHD, LPCM, MPEG] in software, mixes anything that needs to go together, re-encodes it into Dolby Digital and then sends that to your receiver. So, don't be alarmed when your receiver still says "Dolby Digital" even if you've selected DTS in the menus.

http://blogs.msdn.com/andypennell/ar...dvd-audio.aspx
Now lets move on to the Xbox 360 with HD DVD add-on. The Elite's HDMI port cannot handle 5.1 channels due to hardware limitations, so multi-channel audio can only be sent via S/PDIF. At least you get a choice of which encoder is used to re-encode the audio: WMA Pro, DTS or Dolby Digital. Opinions vary on which is the best choice, but in theory at least the preference is the order I described, assuming your receiver can handle it...

All the Xbox allows you to select is what you wish the decoded audio to be re-encoded to for Optical / HDMI Output; Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1 or WMA Pro 5.1.

[aidanbrowne]

thanks for that mate

[RottenFox]

Originally Posted by incstlouis

If you have a component cable that is 5 Wire (RGB + The stereo Audio), you should be good for surround sound

thats not true,the 2 audio cables-red/white(left,right),that are part of the component 5 cable lead,or the vga lead,will only give stereo,or at best,a pseudo surround,which quite frankly,if connected to a surround system,will sound rubbish,compared to a proper optical audio cable,which will give 5.1 surround,as opposed to stereo.

so all you need to pick up,is a toslink optical audio cable,for 5.1 surround,through a surround system.