While I was waiting for my HD-DVD add-on drive to arrive, I did some research on getting full 1080p from my XBOX 360 to my television (since the television seemingly only allowed 1080p over HDMI, not component or the PC input port, the latter would only support more standard 4:3 resolutions according to the manual). After shifting through several, long threads over at AVS Forum, I ran across several posts about using the VGA cable for the XBOX 360 and getting 1080p that way.

So I picked up the VGA cable, which was a bit spendy at around $40 but it is the price for wanting 1080p, wired up the console and, lo and behold, it worked! Well, the console reset the resolution back to 480p/widescreen but I was able to switch it to 1920x1080. After a couple of minutes of messing around with the settings on the television, I got to the point where the picture quality was as optimal (to me) as possible.

Other than the nagging message that the television displays about an unsupported resolution (pressing the "Display" button twice on the remote would clear it) and the XBOX 360 Dashboard looking a tad blurrier than 720p or 1080i over component (then again, the Dashboard is meant to be a 10-foot UI), I was ready to play one of the HD-DVD movies that I got, "The 40 Year-Old Virgin". Sure, it's not the best movie to exploit HD media, but it was the one I threw on the table and is encoded at 1080p.

The picture quality over the VGA cable is pretty good, a tad bit clearer than running 1080i over component. Compared to other same-genre movies that I have watched on Blu-Ray, it does not look any better or any worse.

I cannot judge the sound quality as I'm using the built-in speakers for my television (I still need to run cables to my receiver after re-doing the cabling mess).

I'm not sure if I want to sit through the bundled "King Kong" movie or not, but "Serenity" is queued up for play in the next couple of days.

While watching the movie, I could not hear either the console or the HD-DVD drive, as that was one of my concerns. The same can be said about my Playstation 3, but cannot be said while playing games on the XBOX 360.

Anyway, more to come...