gizmodo.com— "The 360 HD DVD player may not be available just yet, but you can get some breathing room on everyone else this Xmas by pre-ordering yours today." Nice looking drive.
Nov 4, 2006View in Crawl 4
Sooner or later your player will wear out and you will need to replace it. Hopefully your movies will last between 15 and 100 years. It's the content investment you really need to protect. One day these $500 to $1000 dollar players will go for $100 just as DVD players have. Personally I would like to see multi format disk with all 3 formats. As the Market is saturated the price will come down and widespread adoption will take hold. That coupled with the fact that DVD9 isn't going anywhere makes multi format seem like the only chance High Def has.
>>Life is too shortexactly this is an investment in lifestyle, some of us have been sitting on hd home theaters for years and are tired of waiting. While the $600+ players are a plunge I am unwilling to take a $200 unit is acceptable to bridge the 1 to 2 year gap waiting on standalone players to come down in price or a dual format player to emerge. That said I will keep myself underinvested in hd dvds by relying on netflix until the format wars shake out.
no point. Two reasons why: No HDMI and and developers can't take advantage of the extra space for games (which is arguable, but hey, i want them to take advantage of it if its there).
1. HDMI is nice, but unless you have a 1080p TV, not necessary. The capability is there to produce an HDMI cable, so we'll see one eventually.2. True, they can't use the extra space. But so what? Put it on a separate DVD if it's that big. s**t if Oblivion can fit on 1 DVD, you better have one stunningly huge game to justify more than one. Most of the space for huge games comes from long cutscenes anyway.
How is it lame or half-assed? Lame would be to add an accessory drive that played some proprietary media that nobody but Micrsoft is interested in *cough UMD! *coughHalf-assed would be having to buy a special HD-DVD add-on to watch HD-DVDs from a crippled HD-DVD drive that's built in. *cough Xbox DVD kit *cough While I would have liked to see the 360 have an internal, ready-out-of-the-box HD-DVD drive, Microsoft decided to get their product to market as soon as they could since it was 95% ready. And I think it was a good move. The new Xbox Live was done, the CPU was finished, the graphics chip was ready, Epic had convinced them to add more RAM. Heck, they had themselves a next-gen gaming console. What they didn't have was a next-gen gaming console + next-gen movie player. Since the 360 is a rather flexible platform, and no games needed more space than a 9GB DVD could provide for the foreseeable future, they decided "Oh what the hell. Put some DVD drives in there and start building the damn thing. We'll add the HD-DVD drive later."
I just picked up the HD DVD drive at EB today (got the only one that wasn't a pre order) Things to note: The xbox stays silent the whole time and the HD DVD drive iss also very silent can't here a thing even when the movie is on mute.
gwolfNov 4, 2006
Sooner or later your player will wear out and you will need to replace it. Hopefully your movies will last between 15 and 100 years. It's the content investment you really need to protect. One day these $500 to $1000 dollar players will go for $100 just as DVD players have. Personally I would like to see multi format disk with all 3 formats. As the Market is saturated the price will come down and widespread adoption will take hold. That coupled with the fact that DVD9 isn't going anywhere makes multi format seem like the only chance High Def has.
xinulNov 4, 2006
>>Life is too shortexactly this is an investment in lifestyle, some of us have been sitting on hd home theaters for years and are tired of waiting. While the $600+ players are a plunge I am unwilling to take a $200 unit is acceptable to bridge the 1 to 2 year gap waiting on standalone players to come down in price or a dual format player to emerge. That said I will keep myself underinvested in hd dvds by relying on netflix until the format wars shake out.
middlemanNov 4, 2006
WTF, mhockey?
sk545Nov 4, 2006
no point. Two reasons why: No HDMI and and developers can't take advantage of the extra space for games (which is arguable, but hey, i want them to take advantage of it if its there).
squidwarriorNov 4, 2006
1. HDMI is nice, but unless you have a 1080p TV, not necessary. The capability is there to produce an HDMI cable, so we'll see one eventually.2. True, they can't use the extra space. But so what? Put it on a separate DVD if it's that big. s**t if Oblivion can fit on 1 DVD, you better have one stunningly huge game to justify more than one. Most of the space for huge games comes from long cutscenes anyway.
squidwarriorNov 5, 2006
How is it lame or half-assed? Lame would be to add an accessory drive that played some proprietary media that nobody but Micrsoft is interested in *cough UMD! *coughHalf-assed would be having to buy a special HD-DVD add-on to watch HD-DVDs from a crippled HD-DVD drive that's built in. *cough Xbox DVD kit *cough While I would have liked to see the 360 have an internal, ready-out-of-the-box HD-DVD drive, Microsoft decided to get their product to market as soon as they could since it was 95% ready. And I think it was a good move. The new Xbox Live was done, the CPU was finished, the graphics chip was ready, Epic had convinced them to add more RAM. Heck, they had themselves a next-gen gaming console. What they didn't have was a next-gen gaming console + next-gen movie player. Since the 360 is a rather flexible platform, and no games needed more space than a 9GB DVD could provide for the foreseeable future, they decided "Oh what the hell. Put some DVD drives in there and start building the damn thing. We'll add the HD-DVD drive later."
marosnaxNov 11, 2006
I just picked up the HD DVD drive at EB today (got the only one that wasn't a pre order) Things to note: The xbox stays silent the whole time and the HD DVD drive iss also very silent can't here a thing even when the movie is on mute.
appleman108Dec 21, 2006
If you guys like this, make sure to check out and digg my story about the review it got:<a class="user" href="http://digg.com/users/appleman108/news/submitted">http://digg.com/users/appleman108/news/submitted</a>