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27" iMac Video Input With Xbox 360?

OK, after using my Atlona AT-HD620 some more this weekend with my PS3 and 360, I can safely say that if you have a 360, don't bother with the Atlona.

Why?

Because 1080p DOES NOT WORK.

Now you're probably saying, "Eh? Yes it does!"

Well, yes it does, and... well... no it doesn't.

I spent many hours going over the following issue with a fine-tooth comb.

The Problem with the Atlona AT-HD620:

For some reason, reasons I cannot explain, the AT-HD620 drops frames when running at 1080p. A classic example is Geometry Wars 2, an XBOX Live Arcade title.

If you zoom around the screen in 1080p and watch your ship, every 5-10 seconds you'll see the ship "skip." It was annoying me since I didn't recall the game doing this at 1080p when connected to my Samsung 1080p TV or my Panasonic PT-AE4000U 1080p projector, both in 1080p of course...

So I loaded up Castle Crashers, another XBOX Live Arcade game. While not as easy to see, it TOO has the same "skipping" like the scaler can't keep up, potentially.

Now I have TWO XBOX 360s, one connected to my projector and one connected to my 2009 27" iMac, so I grabbed my other 360 and HDMI cables and tested it again connected to my iMac. SAME problem, and NO issue connected to the projector with either game.

So what's going on here?

I set the console to 720p, and the skipping is GONE. Completely not there anymore. At first I thought it was the higher resolution causing issues for the 360's rendering/CPU etc, but it's clear it's not the case since there's no issue connected to other display devices.

I tested my PS3, and I don't see any issues with Wipeout HD in 1080p, or a few other titles/Blu-ray movies I tested, but I'll do more testing over the coming days.

What it comes down to is that if you buy an Atlona AT-HD620 for your XBOX 360, it's an inferior experience than at 720p in terms of "frame rate" (hesitant to call it frame rate since the frame rate isn't the issue..). Now, thankfully, 99% of games on the 360 are only 720p anyway, but it's definitely a bummer that the AT-HD620 fails to deliver flawless XBOX 360 playback when set to 1080p.

Now, it may actually be better to set the 360 to 720p anyway, since most games are, and there's no need to have the 360 scale to 1080p, and then the Atlona scale to 1440p when the Atlona can just scale from 720p to 1440p by itself. Seems to be needless processing there on the part of the 360... But still, again the point is that the Atlona just doesn't handle XBOX 360 at 1080p as well as it should, and as well as it advertises.

I will be following up with Atlona about this, and will see what they have to say...
 
We had done some extensive testing for HD620 and Xbox, PS3, Cable/Sat, etc... What we had noticed on Xbox is that most of the games are 720p and the console is scaling 720p-->1080p. There are different versions of Xbox 360 and they seem to behave very different. We did test the first generation and we do notice the effect, from our measurement this is related to the 2 scalers interfering with each other.

We suggest using native 720p output from the Xbox and having our High-Quality scaler to take 720p to 1440p. This way the latency will be below 2ms, if you have the Xbox scaler from 720p to 1080p, the latency is higher (much higher).
 
But that doesn't address the issue of Geometry Wars 2 being a 1080p native game..., does it?

As an addendum, my 360s are both the new slim 250GB S over HDMI.
 
WilliamG said:
But that doesn't address the issue of Geometry Wars 2 being a 1080p native game..., does it?
Click to expand...

Even though the game is 1080p, the Xbox video scaler has no pass-though function and therefore it scales it.
The Xbox is not designed for pure 1080p, at least not all of them.
 
OK, well it's not a deal breaker, but it does draw attention to the fact that if all you need is 720p from the 360, there are cheaper alternatives.

If, however, you're hooking up 1080p from the PS3, though, and want Blu-ray and games etc in 1080p, the Atlona is great.
 
Just to update, I got my Wii2HDMI adapter. and it does indeed pass video and audio through to my iMac via the Atlona AT-HD620! Success!

ONE downside. You need to set the Wii to 480i. If you set it to 480p, there's some bizarre screen tearing every ~20 seconds or so. Aside from this issue (which I assume is the Atlona's issue), Wii works great on the iMac. :)

For those curious:

http://www.neoya.com/shop/wii2hdmi/
 
WilliamG said:
Just to update, I got my Wii2HDMI adapter. and it does indeed pass video and audio through to my iMac via the Atlona AT-HD620! Success!

ONE downside. You need to set the Wii to 480i. If you set it to 480p, there's some bizarre screen tearing every ~20 seconds or so. Aside from this issue (which I assume is the Atlona's issue), Wii works great on the iMac. :)

For those curious:

http://www.neoya.com/shop/wii2hdmi/
Click to expand...

Sounds good, thanks for the review. BTW, be careful not to throw the wiimote at the iMac screen! ;) (just kidding)
 
WilliamG said:
Just to update, I got my Wii2HDMI adapter. and it does indeed pass video and audio through to my iMac via the Atlona AT-HD620! Success!

ONE downside. You need to set the Wii to 480i. If you set it to 480p, there's some bizarre screen tearing every ~20 seconds or so. Aside from this issue (which I assume is the Atlona's issue), Wii works great on the iMac. :)

For those curious:

http://www.neoya.com/shop/wii2hdmi/
Click to expand...

im only looking for a solution to play wii on my imac.

would this setup work? wii > wii2hdmi adapter > hdmi miniport cable > 27" imac

http://www.monoprice.com/products/p...=10246&cs_id=1024603&p_id=5995&seq=1&format=2
 
Cycom said:
Yes, the 27" ACD, unlike the iMac, supports both 720p and 1080p.
Click to expand...

OK i'm going to sound a little like a broken record, and i mean absolutely no disrespect to the guy whose post i quoted...but can anyone confirm the above to be true?

I am a new owner of a 27 inch cinema display and would really, really like to expand my gaming options by incorporating a PS3 or Xbox360 into the fold. My 13 inch MBP simply wont cut it on it's own. I want to play Fallout: New Vegas damnit!!!

I've been trawling the web but no one make specific reference to the 27 inch cinema display, only the imac

I know the imac has a 720p input limitation but can anyone here say with absolute certainty that this does or does not apply to the new 27 inch cinema display?

I just cant find a straight, unequivocal answer anywhere

If the ACD is similarly restricted, i suppose i will have to spring the hard cash for an Atlona unit and rely on upsampling rather than a hardcoded 720p input...BUT if there is no restriction, and the ACD accepts 1080p input, then my next question is this: Will the 1080p upsampled to 1440p on the Atlona unit look better than the un-upsampled 1080p input from cheaper units like the Belkin/Kanex converters?

Or question rephrased: Disregarding the switching capability on the Atlona, as a 27 inch ACD owner, is there any advantage to owning the Atlona (vis a vis its upsampling quality, latency, image quality etc etc) vs the Belkin AV360 purely for Xbox360 or PS3 input?

any response greatly appreciated
 
the AT-HD620 looks promising, well guess will have to buy one when my ps3 arrives but i have a question,

i currently got the xbox 360 with a vga cable, can i connect my 360 to 2010 imac 27" with the Apple Display Port to VGA adapter?

thanks in advance.
 
blackreplica said:
OK i'm going to sound a little like a broken record, and i mean absolutely no disrespect to the guy whose post i quoted...but can anyone confirm the above to be true?

I am a new owner of a 27 inch cinema display and would really, really like to expand my gaming options by incorporating a PS3 or Xbox360 into the fold. My 13 inch MBP simply wont cut it on it's own. I want to play Fallout: New Vegas damnit!!!

I've been trawling the web but no one make specific reference to the 27 inch cinema display, only the imac

I know the imac has a 720p input limitation but can anyone here say with absolute certainty that this does or does not apply to the new 27 inch cinema display?

I just cant find a straight, unequivocal answer anywhere

If the ACD is similarly restricted, i suppose i will have to spring the hard cash for an Atlona unit and rely on upsampling rather than a hardcoded 720p input...BUT if there is no restriction, and the ACD accepts 1080p input, then my next question is this: Will the 1080p upsampled to 1440p on the Atlona unit look better than the un-upsampled 1080p input from cheaper units like the Belkin/Kanex converters?

Or question rephrased: Disregarding the switching capability on the Atlona, as a 27 inch ACD owner, is there any advantage to owning the Atlona (vis a vis its upsampling quality, latency, image quality etc etc) vs the Belkin AV360 purely for Xbox360 or PS3 input?

any response greatly appreciated
Click to expand...

These are also questions I had. If you look at the tech specs page for the 27 ACD on the Apple website, you'll notice that under "supported resolutions" it will say the native resolution, 1080p and 720p as supported.This is where the confusion starts! I'm not sure if the Atlona would upscale a 1080p signal from a PS3 to the ACD's native rez. The only thing I can say was that the Belkin made my 360 look like **** on my ACD.
 
I have had the atlona for 3 months now, it is great, yesterday I took delivery of 2 27 inch display for my mac pro, replacing the 24 inch screens, they are fantastic, for some reason the screen blanking i experienced with the 24's has now gone.

1080 movies paled fullscreen on VLC look amazing, much better than the 24.

Will be posting some pictures of COD black ops on the 27 as soon as I receive it.
 
WilliamG said:
OK, after using my Atlona AT-HD620 some more this weekend with my PS3 and 360, I can safely say that if you have a 360, don't bother with the Atlona.

Why?

Because 1080p DOES NOT WORK.

Now you're probably saying, "Eh? Yes it does!"

Well, yes it does, and... well... no it doesn't.

I spent many hours going over the following issue with a fine-tooth comb.

The Problem with the Atlona AT-HD620:

For some reason, reasons I cannot explain, the AT-HD620 drops frames when running at 1080p. A classic example is Geometry Wars 2, an XBOX Live Arcade title.

If you zoom around the screen in 1080p and watch your ship, every 5-10 seconds you'll see the ship "skip." It was annoying me since I didn't recall the game doing this at 1080p when connected to my Samsung 1080p TV or my Panasonic PT-AE4000U 1080p projector, both in 1080p of course...

So I loaded up Castle Crashers, another XBOX Live Arcade game. While not as easy to see, it TOO has the same "skipping" like the scaler can't keep up, potentially.

Now I have TWO XBOX 360s, one connected to my projector and one connected to my 2009 27" iMac, so I grabbed my other 360 and HDMI cables and tested it again connected to my iMac. SAME problem, and NO issue connected to the projector with either game.

So what's going on here?

I set the console to 720p, and the skipping is GONE. Completely not there anymore. At first I thought it was the higher resolution causing issues for the 360's rendering/CPU etc, but it's clear it's not the case since there's no issue connected to other display devices.

I tested my PS3, and I don't see any issues with Wipeout HD in 1080p, or a few other titles/Blu-ray movies I tested, but I'll do more testing over the coming days.

What it comes down to is that if you buy an Atlona AT-HD620 for your XBOX 360, it's an inferior experience than at 720p in terms of "frame rate" (hesitant to call it frame rate since the frame rate isn't the issue..). Now, thankfully, 99% of games on the 360 are only 720p anyway, but it's definitely a bummer that the AT-HD620 fails to deliver flawless XBOX 360 playback when set to 1080p.

Now, it may actually be better to set the 360 to 720p anyway, since most games are, and there's no need to have the 360 scale to 1080p, and then the Atlona scale to 1440p when the Atlona can just scale from 720p to 1440p by itself. Seems to be needless processing there on the part of the 360... But still, again the point is that the Atlona just doesn't handle XBOX 360 at 1080p as well as it should, and as well as it advertises.

I will be following up with Atlona about this, and will see what they have to say...
Click to expand...

Can I conclude from this that connecting a Xbox 360 to the iMac 27" with the Atlona AT-HD620 is waste of money? I really don't wanna pay 80 euro (110 bucks) for almost no improvement compared to the other 720p converters.
 
hey guys, i joined this forum just for the sake of asking you guys why i can't connect my 27" imac to my xbox 360.

i just bought the xbox 360 slim yesterday, and i bought the mini display port to HDMI (female) cable. since, where i'm from, the kanex XD is not available yet.

so, i turned on my xbox, hooked up the hdmi cable to the female hdmi port thats connecting it to the mini display port. but when i press the "command +F2" to engage the target display mode, nothing happens. as if there is no respons whatsoever from the imac. i've tried connecting the xbox to a normal HDTV to set it on 720p, but when i hooked it back to the imac, same thing, no response.

is this because i'm not using the mini display port cables such as the the ones that kanex has or is a problem with the HDMI cable or the imac?

your help is truly appreciated guys, thanks!
 
BintangTimur said:
hey guys, i joined this forum just for the sake of asking you guys why i can't connect my 27" imac to my xbox 360.

i just bought the xbox 360 slim yesterday, and i bought the mini display port to HDMI (female) cable. since, where i'm from, the kanex XD is not available yet.

so, i turned on my xbox, hooked up the hdmi cable to the female hdmi port thats connecting it to the mini display port. but when i press the "command +F2" to engage the target display mode, nothing happens. as if there is no respons whatsoever from the imac. i've tried connecting the xbox to a normal HDTV to set it on 720p, but when i hooked it back to the imac, same thing, no response.

is this because i'm not using the mini display port cables such as the the ones that kanex has or is a problem with the HDMI cable or the imac?

your help is truly appreciated guys, thanks!
Click to expand...

You need a scaler/converter. Just using a MDP to HDMI cable isn't enough.
 
Confirmed

I finally got my hdmi cable and minidisplay to hdmi, and I can confirm that my xbox 360 is displaying on my iMac. It takes a couple seconds of screen flicker, and then money.

I didn't buy an active converter and it works fine. I spent 5 bucks. Perhaps it's because my iMac is less than 2 weeks old
 
Last edited:
Do you mind sharing what cables you bought?

7h0r said:
I finally got my hdmi cable and minidisplay to hdmi, and I can confirm that my xbox 360 is displaying on my iMac. It takes a couple seconds of screen flicker, and then money.

I didn't buy an active converter and it works fine. I spent 5 bucks. Perhaps it's because my iMac is less than 2 weeks old
Click to expand...
 
7h0r said:
I finally got my hdmi cable and minidisplay to hdmi, and I can confirm that my xbox 360 is displaying on my iMac. It takes a couple seconds of screen flicker, and then money.

I didn't buy an active converter and it works fine. I spent 5 bucks. Perhaps it's because my iMac is less than 2 weeks old
Click to expand...

I thought the mini displayport signal was way different then the HDMI video signal, so that was the reason it needs a converter. But apparently it depends on the Mac hardware or something, that has been updated.

Anyone can try this on 2009 iMac and a brand new one?
 
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