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New development and testing tool will aid studios in HD-DVD authoring.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 HD-DVD Emulator software allows studios to test HD-DVD movies and interactive content in a virtual environment that also provides debugging tools, rather effectively streamlining the currently established workflow that requires authoring studios to burn new HD-DVD discs every time a revision needs testing, manually seek out bugs, and hand-code programming corrections. The HD-DVD Emulator software runs on standard Xbox 360s and is capable of playing HD-DVD test content from network drives, USB flash drives, and burned optical discs. The licensing fee for the commercial software is $2,999, which equates to a rather absurd number of Microsoft Points.

The announcement is indicative of Microsoft’s support for HD-DVD on a tertiary level, but what the Xbox 360 HD-DVD Emulator software tools are really about is helping studios debug interactive features programmed on Microsoft’s HDi language for interactive content on HD-DVDs. HDi is not the only means by which advanced features like interactive games and picture-in-picture commentary tracks can be programmed for HD-DVDs, but due to good support on Microsoft’s part and a stable feature set, HDi has become the generally favored tool for HD-DVD content creation. Its strengths are particularly apparent in situations in which a movie like “300″ is available on both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. A glance at the back of the boxes reveals the Blu-ray version lacks almost any interactive features, a consequence of the currently unstable and difficult to use BD-Java and Blu-ray Profile 1.0 / 1.1 development environments.