Report: Xbox 360 Disc Change Adds 1GB, Improve Piracy Detection

by Jeffrey Davis, posted on 30 March 2011 / 2,588 Views

If reports are any indication, it looks like the updated disc format planned for use in Xbox 360 consoles may have improved piracy detection, along with an extra gigabyte of storage allowance.

According to Eurogamer's Digital Foundry blog, the reports indicate, according to the source, that whatever extra space is gained with the disc change likely comes from either a drastic recuction or total elimination of the usual video partition for which is typical of most DVD-format optical media.

The source, who has apparently confirmed the implementation of the new disc format (so that everyone knows this is not the early delivery of any typical kind of April Fool's joke) added that beta program implementation will also take place similar to that of prior changes made for the Xbox 360 platform. Participants in the beta will apparently get a free copy of Halo: Reach for use during the beta phase that is built on the new disc format.

The beta program may be important for testing of every single feature addition made with the new disc format, as various Xbox 360 consoles have varied the use of several disc reader components from at least four manufacturers.

As for the piracy detection improvements, noted Xbox 360 hacker Commodore4eva believes that “MS will introduce XBG3 – this will add more AP checks, CVI (content integerity) checks, increase the disc size and adds a new layer for protection issues – all in the 20500 sdk,” and is ready for the challenge of figuring out the intricacies of the new piracy measures -- even so far as daring Microsoft to “bring it on.”

19 Comments

viperlegendkiller (on 02 April 2011)

yeh if blu rays so good how come crysis 360 looks better than any ps3 game

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Mr Puggsly (on 31 March 2011)

That's good, developers already do amazing things with only 6.5GB. We are 5 years into this generation and its pretty obvious going with Bluray was a mistake for Sony. They lost billions of dollars and most games fit on a DVD just fine.

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Genera1MLD (on 31 March 2011)

if blu-ray really is supposed to be better than DVD why hasnt the PC/MAC addopted blu-ray over DVD, most new pc's/msc's still come with a default DVD-RW drive and only a few (maybe around 5%) have a blu-ray drive, so adding 1gb to the current 360's DVD roms isnt as bad as you think, also case closed about the graphic boost blu-ray was supposed to offer as its been said so many times "the gpu deals with graphcis, there not streamed straingt from the disc" that was just a sales ploy to get people to buy into blu-ray on most smart people saw through it easpecially PC gamers, most DVD content is compressed so you can fit more than 9GB of data on a dvd rom ie TDU2 on the pc once uncompressed it taked up over 18gb of HDD space and they do the same for 360 games so the only main difference is that blu-ray is uncomressed and dvd is compreesed, its that simple i just wish the stupid fanboys would understand how compression actually works.

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Bl00dSaint (on 30 March 2011)

@errorpwns U need to stfu stupid fanboy. No1 needs to hear u trolling around the site. Just get a life ignorant piece of Sh**

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AOvechkin08 (on 30 March 2011)

Now they can make FFXIII-2 on 2 and a half discs for Xbox 360 XD

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errorpwns (on 30 March 2011)

@elvacano80 Didn't realize this was a site that supported unsupported ignorant comments with no basis or intelligence behind them. I am assuming you're a Sony fanboy?

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elvacano80 (on 30 March 2011)

@errorpwns should get banned for insulting another user

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DonFerrari (on 30 March 2011)

But Xbox360 didn't need more than 8,7Gb to be great, space is useless, why would you want Bluray right??? /jk good thing to have a improvement in this many fronts;

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errorpwns (on 30 March 2011)

LMAO! 1 GB will make Call of Duty graphics barely better... smh. hahaha Blu-Ray FTW 50+ GB ---- Ignorance right? Sure you get slightly higher res textures but when the game is only utilizing 720P texture the extra space doesn't even do anything for the PS3. Sure for some games it works, but the graphics are mainly dealt with by the graphics processor not the disc you idiot.

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AaronSOLDIER (on 30 March 2011)

@justp94 You can get over 60GB now.

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Pemalite (on 30 March 2011)

Well for starters... An XBox 360 game can already exceed the 9gb capacity of a DVD via two methods, compression and procedural synthesis. 1gb will go along way though and hopefully we get better textures which will trickle over to the PC. :)

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thranx (on 30 March 2011)

"mundus6 44 minutes ago I don't see how this will improve piracy detection, when the partition they most likely are gonna remove to get that extra GB is the one used to counter piracy and put the dashboard update on the disc. 1 extra GB is always welcome though, as some games comes on 2 discs, not a big problem for 99% of the games, but some games simply don't work on 2 discs." I believe what it actually does is write the information onto parts of the disc that pirates cannot write to with normal dvd burners. Basically meaning you can't burn the game dvd yourself. I could be wrong. Read it on a different article posted in the forums.

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trunkswd (on 30 March 2011)

Best they can do without changing the disc drive. I'm guessing there will just be an update so the current disc drives can read these new DVDs.

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Night565 (on 30 March 2011)

Nice little upgrade, not a whole lot, but they could do nothing at all...so ill take this.

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GuiltySpartan77 (on 30 March 2011)

I guess an extra 1 GB is better than no GB added. Hopefully the next gen will have 100 GB discs then there will be no complaining.

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mundus6 (on 30 March 2011)

I don't see how this will improve piracy detection, when the partition they most likely are gonna remove to get that extra GB is the one used to counter piracy and put the dashboard update on the disc. 1 extra GB is always welcome though, as some games comes on 2 discs, not a big problem for 99% of the games, but some games simply don't work on 2 discs.

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MightyGrogg (on 30 March 2011)

Only 1GB. I was hoping for like 4-5GB more space. It's still nice for the Xbox 360, but once they move to the next-gen we're going to need Blu-Ray or something better. We heard that gamers who do this beta test has a chance of their XBox 360 non-functioning. Microsoft has said if they would replace the 360 if that did happen or not.