Shock as Gates Shows External HD-DVD Drive for Xbox 360 – Full Report

Thats actually the beauty of it. Spend between 1-200 to retro fit your current x360 or spend 500 on a standard hd-dvd.

Christian

But don't add-ons for consoles tend to be somewhat limited compared to the stand alones? And what if you sell you xbox 360 or lend it to a friend, will you be without a HD-DVD player? or does it work striaght to your telly?

no, infact the xbox makes a great cd player and it can rip tracks to the drive and work as a media player... and it has a visualization... jaguar cd had a nice visualizer too... and they all ofer the ability to pick a track of a list rather that ... skipp... skip... skip... skip... and the 360 alows for play lsit managment... make it far superior to any cd player... as for dvd... usign it as a dvd is great cause if you are just sittign and watching a movie cause you dont have any friends onlien to play with... it actually pops up the notifies over top of your movie so if you get a message or a freidn invite you wont miss it cause you where using your other dvd player. im sure hd-dvd will be the same




of course you woudl be without it... but what if you sell your hd-dvd player... wont you then be without an hd-dvd player!? i mean what sort of question is that? if i let me friend borrow my tv... will my xbox still work?!

I think he was stating that accessories have limited or no use if one wants to sell his system. A more logical conundrum is when your A/V system is all integrated and say your DVD drive stops working or you want to upgrade or sell a piece off. True integration is going to suck a bit. Like DVD players built into tvs. Tell me which one of you would want to buy a piece of crap like that?! Hmm???

Anyways, the whole 360 integration and I could do without and be happy. When I'm watching Schindler's List and Amon is about to go a massacre a few thousand more people, I don't want a notification coming up that BigDikMasta has come online or that new content for Crapeo - Elements of other better Rare games has come out. That totally kills the mood. (No reason why I picked such an awfully horrific movie as my example, just did.) I'm typically not going to drop everything and and start playing Halo 2. I mean I'm not saying it's not nice. I like being able to move around freely through the system without exiting a game and such, but it's not like something I can't live without. I've been playing games offline for 25 years now, sans the last year when I got Live(tm).

Will I get a HD-DVD drive for 360? Depends. Who knows if HD-DVDs will win out. We may be left with very white and green paperweights if Blu-Ray wins. I was going to hold out for a while anyway to see who wins, Microsoft dropping an HD player in a few months won't change my mind.

Point is this - no-one knows if HD DVD or Blu Ray will win. Or if they both will lose out to the Optical disc which is being released later this year. It has a much larger capacity. It may be that everyone is happy with what we have at the moment. You can easily fit a film on a DVD.
If BluRay wins then Sony will be OK, but if not, it will cause them Major problems. Microsoft are not committed to any format, so they will just release an addon BluRay option. If Optical wins, they will release this option.
If BluRay does not win, Sony will be in dire straits. They have no options.

If you're talking about the holographic type disc (I can't remember the exact name) surely that's having more development trouble then bluray (all those reports about how bluray couldn't perform outside a lab because it damaged too easy - I know its been fixed now, its just an example of teething problems with new technology)?

Plus there's the need to make things affordable. HD-DVD's main advantage is that it'll cost less to change production plants in china over from dvds. Having a stupidly high-tech disc when there's no real consumer desire sounds like a slightly misguided move from a business point of view. We're just hitting capacity on dvd's and compression techniques are improving all the time(e.g. oblivian for the 360, regually rumoured as having to be more then one disc due to the size, has been confirmed to be shipping on one dvd). Now we're getting two formats with 2-5 times the capacity? do we need 150gig discs? hell my hard drive's has less storage then one dual layer bluray and I'm doing fine.

Another point about the upcoming holographic discs is that Sony are helping to develop it. No way it will come out without Blu-Ray getting a fair crack of the whip.