We've just got wind of news that today is likely to see the announcement by Microsoft and ATI that portions of ATI's Avivo video processing and display technologies have made it as part of the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive accessory delivery, specifically for processing H.264 video to be carried by some HD-DVD disks.
Avivo is a combination of software and hardware that improves processing for motion and 2D video on the company's mobile, desktop and professional display adaptors for the PC.
The technology for the Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on seems to be a H.264 decoder running on the 360's existing hardware, designed to use the Xenon CPU and Xenos graphics hardware (designed by ATI) to leverage their combined processing power to accelerate H.264 format decode.
It looks set to use Xenos's formidable programmable shader hardware to offload a fair chunk of processing and post-process filtering from Xenon, allowing for high-bitrate H.264 playback at HD resolutions, at high quality.
While certain parts of H.264 decoding aren't incredibly suited for processing on a modern programmable GPU, there's still significant assistance to be had, highlighting the use of Xenos to assist Xenon in making it all happen.
Given the makeup of the Xbox 360, it's likely that ATI were always going to be engaged -- from day one almost -- for the H.264 decoder, given their supply of Xenos and their expertise in H.264 processing in the PC space, negating any hint of choice on Microsoft's part.
If our intel is correct, the timing of this announcement rather indicates that the add-on is likely pretty much complete and ready for sale. Look out for a press release in due course.
