Xbox 360 HD-DVD Interview

[H] Console - Xbox 360 HD-DVD Interview: "In addition to the amazing high quality video and awesome surround sound you’d expect from a standard HD-DVD player, the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player also features integrated chapter selection, bookmarks and a secondary video decoder that allows the disc to play separate video streams to simultaneously watch additional content like behind the scenes features as the movie plays. Not only that, but the HD DVD player is network capable which allows for the HD-DVD player to be updated if needed."

Who are you and what do you do?

My name’s Shaheen Gandhi. I’m a developer on the Xbox Console & Consumer Software team. We own all the software that goes on Xbox 360 that’s not a game. We wrote the operating system, dashboard, guide, etc. For 360, I did a lot of work on the input and voice software. For the HD DVD Player, I did a bunch of DRM and integration.

How long have you worked for Microsoft?

I’ve worked at Microsoft full-time for about 3.5 years. I had interned for Microsoft a couple of years before hand in a related Xbox group. I consider myself insanely lucky to have worked on Xbox 360 as my first product outside of college.

How did you become part of the HD-DVD development team?

This was pretty natural. After Xbox 360 shipped last year, I looked around at the various projects going on around Xbox and decided it was the most interesting for me. I was given the opportunity to own a lot of the security architecture for the player, while other, more capable, people handled the software architecture.