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Joined: Nov 2006
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I took a chance and picked up the Joytech one for $18 USD shipped. It's an all in one connector with RGB composite, RCA component, S-Video, and optical audio. Saw the difference right away with the dash running at 1080i. It's too bad that maneuvering through the thumbs was painfully slow. Dropped the dash down to 720p and still a vast improvement over standard but noticably worse than 1080i. Many of my divx actually were worse after this. I had to play with the settings quite a bit. Some of them are still blurrier than with normal component cables. The other half had little to slight improvement upscaling to 1080i. Watching the video at original size, it's obvious the output is there and the source is just not good enough quality to display on my set (divx 6.0 encoded dvds using home theatre setting). Xvids also from dvd source were hit or miss as well. Finally, I tried a few AMT trailers and I could see what this xbox is actually capable of doing. The detail on high quality trailers was amazing compared to the normal cables. I tried a few true HD sources but of course, the xbox couldn't handle the stream. On lower quality HD streams (720p mpeg2 compressed from sat source), I got massive frame drops (avg 15 fps). On 1080i, I got the xbox to play for a maximum of 5 seconds before just choking up (though the picture that I did see was spectacular). Not bad for an $18 item. I think I picked them up at etoys, a subsidiary of eshop but the big box online stores had them for about the same price (sam's club, walmart).
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Joined: Dec 2004
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update: just got my "BOX" knock-off HD Pack, and it works great (component video + optical digital audio), 720p 16:9 NTSC.
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I got one of the MadCats from bestbuy ($15.00) and when it restarted (resolution was auto) it slammed into 1080i and blew me away. Course the animations and what have you slowed down so I went down to 720p but the overall change in clarity is amazing. All those silly custom DVD icons I was making.... I CAN SEE EM NOW! woohoo!
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kraqh3d
Retired Developer
Posts: 7,172
cool.... i was gonna ask about that. i now have a second hdtv set and have been trying to find an hd av pack. i was very close to manually adding the outputs myself right off the motherboard but i'd prefer to just get an avpack and save a few hours of work.
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Joined: Feb 2004
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Another victim of the Joytech cable here. It's crap. I get worse picture in 720p than with the RGB scart cable. Nice ghosting etc.
As for how can it be better by hand-soldering? That's easy. If you just use 75ohm video-cable (or even 50-ohm computer cable) you already have way way better cable than what these guys peddle to us. I'm fairly certain the joytech cable contains in best scenario so-called "microphone" cable which is indeed shielded but has completely inappropriate impedance for video signal. Hence reflections, hence ghosting.
In fact I think I'll dig around a bit and see if I can locate the original composite cable ..
I take it you guys have had OK experiences with the "box" HD AV kit you have to buy a set of component cables for? Those seem to work out to about $25 including shipping (and 25€ for decent set of component cables..)
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Joined: Sep 2003
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pike
Team Kodi Admin
Posts: 5,008
yes msdash is the easiest way to enable HD modes. Msdash requires a valid componentcable connected and xbox in ntsc mode before is shows the HD modes. this setting is then saved in an eeprom.