I'm just now learning that the original Xbox requires the DVD playback kit (which includes it's own remote) in order to play DVDs at all. That was kind of surprising to me. It's one area where I can surely say the PS2 hardware was ahead of Microsoft. Just pop a DVD in and play, control it with your Dual Shock. No BS necessary. For the longest time, I just assumed this was how the Xbox worked as well.
I was trying to experiment with the video output on my 4K TV, since DVDs look like hot garbage playing on modern devices, I was curious how it'd look coming from a source that only outputs 480p. I figure it still won't look good, but might look better. Ideally I'd just play them on my 480p CRT for best results, but XBOX requires this little doohickey which I don't have. Lord even knows where my PS2 fat is these days.
I wonder how DVD would look through 480p line doubled to 960p through the OSSC. I have the equipment to test this out, but I've never really tried it, thinking the scaling of my Blu-ray player of what few DVDs I had did an adequate enough job.
Not sure. I did eventually get to test out all of my DVD enable consoles save for PS2 on my 4k TV. XB1 and PS4 are not good choices as it looks like a low HQ stream basically, X360 and PS3 are a decent balance between the pixelation of the image and the crispness you get with up-scaling I guess? I felt 360 beat it out just a tiny bit overall. OG Xbox looks the best to my eye, it's a bit fuzzy and grainy, but no pixelation and very little if any snow effect. It just looks the most natural, even if it's not the sharpest.
On my CRT, the OG Xbox looks pretty good, but I almost wouldn't say that it looks any better than on the 4k, kinda the same. It's the factor of the screen being much smaller which hides the need of noticing a lot of the detail. I guess that's why the quality of older video standard def video never bothered us. The old TVs didn't really provide the real estate needed for a higher resolution image?
