Hacking the XBox 360′s HD-DVD for the PC

Hey, that connector on the drive is a mini atapi port, mainly used on laptop drives and there is an IDE adapter available for internal pc pinouts. As seen here : http://www.colordrives.com/cd-rom%20adapter/cd-rom%20adapter-1.jpg

So yes you can mount the drive internally into your pc, permitting that you have a besel available, or just stealth the drive tray?!

And software side your on your own but im sure there are some applications out ther that will run dvd at decent resolutions.

Can you swap the internal 360 DVD drive with this one, and have it work?

If you can find one, you might want to try a home-brew HD DVD (on DVD-R media) on a Mac.

AFAIK, DVD Player.app does support HD DVD, but only with MPEG2 or H.264, and only if it doesn’t have DRM.

P.S. The laptop drive adapters are about $5-10 on eBay. The work fine for laptop drives (obviously), and I’m guessing they should work fine for this drive as well.

Does that adaptor also carry power? I saw the plug and thought, WTF!

Yes it does indeed, it a single plug solution for slot in dvd drives for most laptops, and carries data and power at 12v,5v and ground. There are many different versions of the adapter, but there is usually an input from a psu to a floppy or regular molex connector as seen in the link i added (in white).

i recognised the plug as soon as i saw it lol. Only technical issue is the front tray? – Is it bare with just the silver besel attached, and also are there regular tapped screw holed on the sides of the drives for mounting in a drive cage.

The circuit board pictured above looks like it just houses the Usb to IDE element as well as providing power from the internal mini Psu. The drive could have been made a lot smaller if it didnte need the 12v 1 amp power, but this cannot obviously be provided over usb.

yeah that connector carries power to the drive too. Some SFF boxes that use notebook optical drives (the Dell Optiplex GX620 for example) use those connectors. I recently scavenged a converter board that has that connector on one side and a regular IDE & floppy power connector on the other. Should be plenty on ebay. This opens up a lot of possibilities…

no the adaptor doesnt carry the power. the back of the HD player has the power. The HD dvd connects using the mini atapi connector to the IDE using the adaptor. The power connects directly to the DVD. If the adaptor does not work (which it should), I would still take it all apart and connect it internally to my internal usb connectors on the motherboard. This way you can still use it as an internal device.

How is intalling drivers then installing a commercial player consider a “hack”? It’s just a USB drive, so none of this should be a surprise. I think the title of the article would be more truthful: “Xbox 360 HD DVD made to work on the PC”

A hack would be if you had managed to rip the movie. Jeesh.

Quick question, could you tell us the exact version of WinDVD 8 you are using. I see that it is the platinum pack, but as of now the WinDVD website states that HD DVD and Blu Ray support must be purchased seperately – with no details as to how. Was it the Japanese version by any chance? A build number would be fantastic if possible.

Well done! I had already pre-ordered the device (despite not actually owning a 360) on the basis of using it as a cheap entry into HD movies. :) – as soon as Europe gets shipments (now December 1st I believe) I shall be in happy HiDef land! :)

Hardly unwilling or unwitting.

Microsoft has been pretty forthright about wanting 360 peripherals of all sorts to work on Vista. It’s part of their plan to converge windows and console gaming (two prongs of a single gaming division).

Given that there’s not a general proliferation of HD-DVD drives available for PCs, who knows if it’s really “cheap” or not.

the board looks like what the imac uses of course i dont know if you can get one from an imac

/. to oblivion…

What about HDCP? Do we still have to buy an HDCP video card + monitor pricey combo??

Hi there,

I have serious doubt’s, that you really got that working, how you described it. First of all, WinDVD 8 is not able to play back HD DVD (it just offers the codecs for VC-1). It will need a Plugin to do so (specially to work with AACS encrypted discs). There are, however some OEM-Versions of WinDVD 6.6 out, that can play back HD DVDs.

Unless you are using the first WinDVD 6.6 Version for the toshiba Qosmio G30, you should not be able to take any screenshots, because that feature was removed later.

Second, your “magic driver” seems to be nothing more than a normal UDF 2.5 reader from Toshiba. If it is so, than it’s trivial to get the drive working on a PC, as it also plays DVDs on an Apple.

Third point: any smart hacker would have recognized a normal Atapi-50-Plug.

So I need more proov, that this is really working how you describe it. Please go into more detail or show a video.

I have to wait until November 24, when the drive becomes available in Europe, so I can check it by myself.

Best Regards
Fraggile

Dude that looks awesome, I assume the disc drive itself is a standard 5.25″ drive that can be put inside a PC shell. If so I just found my new drive =D..

Also can this be used to play xbox/xbox360 games if its pluged into the 360, and for that matter can the xbox 360′s internal dvd drive be replaced by this drive?

“I have serious doubt’s, that you really got that working, how you described it. First of all, WinDVD 8 is not able to play back HD DVD (it just offers the codecs for VC-1). It will need a Plugin to do so (specially to work with AACS encrypted discs). There are, however some OEM-Versions of WinDVD 6.6 out, that can play back HD DVDs.”

You should check avs forum. It has been confirmed that the japanese retail version of windvd 8 platinum works with xbox 360, but no with full resolution.

AlexL,

I have my HD DVD drive connected to my 360.

You cannot put a xbox360 game disk in the drive. It tells you to put the disc in the 360.

Having opened my 360, the connectors on the back of this drive (with or without the circuit board) do not look the same as the drive already in there. Just eyeballing it, it certainly would not be plug and play.

Gar

You need a special version of Intervideos WinDVD 8, which you have to purchase from Japan. Step by step purchasing instructions were (thankfully) posted here.

The Japan version he is using is downres to 960 x 540 so its 540p. It works and anyone can do it. Full hd program is yet to be released.

By the way if you use the Circuit City Coupon posted there it’s $160 + tax =)

woohoo i have some Atapi 50 to 40 pin adapters i stole from some laptop CDrom drives, so it looks like i’m going to have a HDDVD drive in my pc. now i can’t wait to gut a sony to get a bluray drive too.

Exciting news! When I bought my 24″ iMac, I was a little worried that I would be left out of the HD-DVD party, but it seems that though I can’t go out and buy one today, someday (Perhaps with Leopard?) DVD Player.app will be able to play HD movies. Or BlueRay? Or both?

If this is any indication of the prices of drives and they can be plugged in with USB, that will be really wonderful news.

I never realized how icky plain DVDs looked until I saw 1080p Quicktime trailers.

Bring on the future!

Love,

Hanna

I hope to god they ship an Xbox 360 with an internal HD drive… but oh well still a lot cheaper than a damn PS3 or Blue ray drive.

Anyone try it in the regular xbox ?

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=748426&page=1&pp=30

It DOES work and it is working on real commercial HD-DVD’s now. It’s not perfect but it plays movies TODAY.

Here’s a thread on AVS Forum. Including a uncropped picture of the Batman Begins Tumbler that includes the full desktop screencap showing the WinDVD 8 Plat (Japan version) playing in a window and the file directory listing of the Batman Begins HD-DVD (retail U.S. release).

Here’s the real question. Does that Microsoft addon board that’s attached to the internal OEM Toshiba HD-DVD drive have the AACS functionality built into it or is it built into the drive? Someone needs to try connecting the drive directly to PC IDE and seeing if this method still plays back. If not then I’d say the AACS info is built into the PC board with the MS stamp on it like the Toshiba Flash ROM in the HD-A1 has the AACS on it and not on the NEC drive inside.

Removed the screencap of Batman Begins tumbler? I don’t mind it being up ;) you guys do a great job by the way. Thanks again for peeling the box apart! And for the OS/X on intel info, I found the info very helpful. Dell running OS/X is an amusing thing to show folks lol.

If you want post the full uncropped screencap of the tumbler that shows the WinXP desktop =) that should be proof enough that it works (albeit not perfectly yet).

I’ll add the pic of the tumbler back up :)

umm, lets do the math
Xbox 360 premium pack @ ~400 USD + Xbox 360 HDDVD player @ ~200 USD
vs.
Sony PS3 (high end) @ ~600 USD

*cough*, no contest, *cough*

PS3: BluRay / Dvd Player, Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi, 60 GB HDD/

Look at what you are getting for your money!

(im sorry in advance if any of the prices listed are not correct, but i am sure they are)

Hey Bill,

Way to win the format war.

Thanks.
HD-DVD & Toshiba

“umm, lets do the math
Xbox 360 premium pack @ ~400 USD + Xbox 360 HDDVD player @ ~200 USD
vs.
Sony PS3 (high end) @ ~600 USD
*cough*, no contest, *cough*
PS3: BluRay / Dvd Player, Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi, 60 GB HDD/
Look at what you are getting for your money!”

How about this math… don’t buy a PS3 or a 360 @ 0.00
buy the 360 HD-DVD drive @ 200 and use it on your existing pc.
Much better deal than buying ANY BluRay drive on the market.

The HD-DVD Drive dosen’t need drivers in windows XP, mine works fine, you DO need drivers if you want to access the HD-DVD File system though, but without the drivers DVDs and CDs work fine, as it shows up as a normal DVD drive (more or less)

Buy American. Support our Country, our Companies, our Future.

Thanks Xbox!!!

Only XP ? no one feel lucky and try within linux? :)

Slightly off topic, but how did you get the DVD window to show anything but a black field when you took the desktop screenshots? I know that whenever I do a desktop screenshot on any of my systems, I always get black on my current-gen DVD playing software, prob due to copy protection BS (like i’m gonna pirate movies one frame at a time). Unless there’s no such restriction on HD-DVD players (yeah, right).

“Buy American. Support our Country, our Companies, our Future.”

So they can keep screwing us over? Yeah, I like that idea.

“Buy American. Support our Country, our Companies, our Future.”

‘Cuz this drive isn’t made in China?

“#Gav 2 hours, 20 minutes ago

Only XP ? no one feel lucky and try within linux? :)”

I have suspicions that you will see somewhat similar results as for the Mac. Linux is by far OS that supports the most hardware out there. It even supports Apple stuff that Apple no longer supports.

Plug and play in linux really is plug and play, I’ve plugged in some really weird things on my boxes and in Windows I’ve had some headaches, in Linux I just get a nice little box asking me if I want to boot/activate the unit.

Mind, wireless USB/PCI cards are easier on windows, but Linux, put plainly, sucks when it comes to WiFi.

“Buy American. Support our Country, our Companies, our Future.”

Read the fine print. Five yuan says it’s made in China, just like everything else electronic.

h8GWB, turn your hardware acceleration down to none in your advanced video settings and print-screen grabs will capture direct-x displays fine

I can’t seem to get the driver to install, it keep saying the driver is not correct for the drive. what am i doing wrong?

h8GWB: Regarding the black area in any DVD software on any system – that’s because the OS is taking a dump of memory off of the display adapter for the visible screen are. Video is usually sent to another portion of that memory, and the display adapter composites the system display and the video frame together before sending it out to the monitor, so as far as the operating system is concerned, there isn’t anything in the space that would otherwise represent the video… it’s done that way, not for copy protection (though I don’t doubt that copy protection will soon be yet another thing that will be embedded in that whole mess), but because it’s easier to tell the display adapter that there’s a frame of (H,W) pixels that it needs to display at (X,Y) and then fill the contiguous buffer, than it is to split the scanlines out yourself and stick them into the appropriate regions of memory.

h8GWB – When taking a screen shot of a movie playing you are taking a screen shot of the overlay view port (i.e. it’s black in the screen shot as it’s just a window your video card puts the video too directly)

Try playing a video, taking a screen shot, and moving the screen shot over the video in MSPaint, you will see the video coming ‘through’ ms paints black part.

To take a screen shot of video like above you will need to make it play via. a software renderer (not using the video cards hardware overlay) – usually in DVD applications you can change the way it’s rendered (PowerDVD allows you to use there CLEV renderer which will show up in screen shots)

As far as Mac OS X, it says on apple website that their next OS (10.5, Codename Leopard) will support HD DVD, so it will only take some time for apple users to get their hands on working HD DVD software for Macs.

umm, lets do the math
Xbox 360 premium pack @ ~400 USD + Xbox 360 HDDVD player @ ~200 USD
vs.
Sony PS3 (high end) @ ~600 USD

*cough*, no contest, *cough*

PS3: BluRay / Dvd Player, Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi, 60 GB HDD/

Look at what you are getting for your money!

(im sorry in advance if any of the prices listed are not correct, but i am sure they are)

you ever seen real-game shots of PS3? it sucks, rsx is nothing but an downclocked 7800 GTX using direct X 9.0c while R500 is more powerful than an 1950XT and aditionally supports geometry shaders (DX10)

also XBOX gives game developers more freedom in using memory with unifieing both main and graphics ram, PS3 has it separated (256/256vs512), hence the additional bandwith on the cpu ram it doesn´t give you any advantage because rsx is way underpoered…

“Slightly off topic, but how did you get the DVD window to show anything but a black field when you took the desktop screenshots?”
Go into Display Properties–>Settings–>Advanced–>Troubleshoot, set Hardware Acceleration to none, take screen grab. Ka-ching!

Any idea if this drive can be used region-free on Macs to play DVDs? I need a region free DVD player for my HTPC Intel Mac Mini, and this would be a lovely solution (combining DVD and HD-DVD)…

whats the point of this if you can only get 560p?
seems kinda useless for me, considering PAL dvds have not that much less resolution …

You might be able to swap the internal drive physically but I don’t think it will work to play games. I think the firmware on the DVD drive is specific to Xbox for security purposes and since you can’t play games via the HD-DVD drive I doubt you could with it internally. This is all my guessing however.

Buy American. Support our Country, our Companies, our Future.

Thanks Xbox!!!
===========

Toshiba’s American?

For a full hacking the XBox 360′s manual visit amigacam.net.tc

Games wouldn’t work from 360 on Windows, remember, 360 isn’t x86! You would need an emulator.

But does this nerf the online ability that you get normally with a 360?

“umm, lets do the math
Xbox 360 premium pack @ ~400 USD + Xbox 360 HDDVD player @ ~200 USD
vs.
Sony PS3 (high end) @ ~600 USD

*cough*, no contest, *cough*

PS3: BluRay / Dvd Player, Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi, 60 GB HDD/

Look at what you are getting for your money!

(im sorry in advance if any of the prices listed are not correct, but i am sure they are)”

Bluetooth doesn’t matter when there’s already another form of wireless, and the wireless headset for 360 doesn’t suck. As for the HD movies, at least Microsoft gives people a choice. It does suck 360 is short on hard drive space though.

*cough* fanboy *cough*

“umm, lets do the math
Xbox 360 premium pack @ ~400 USD + Xbox 360 HDDVD player @ ~200 USD
vs.
Sony PS3 (high end) @ ~600 USD
*cough*, no contest, *cough*
PS3: BluRay / Dvd Player, Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi, 60 GB HDD/
Look at what you are getting for your money!”

Yah, but the xbox is still the better deal as your not being forced to pay top dollar for the next gen dvd format. With xbox its an option, with ps3 u have to pay for the format that will lose lol.. gg and nice try.

I have both a Mac and a PC, plus I have a 360 and the HD-DVD drive. I first tried it on OSX, the Mac wouldn’t even recognize it. I then booted the Mac into XP Media Center with bootcamp and it recognized it but WOULD NOT install the drivers. I then plugged the HD-DVD drive into my Athlon tower and booted into XP PRO, it recognized it but again would not install the drivers.

I tried it on 3 operating systems and 2 different machines, NONE WORKED!!!

the 360 HD-DVD Addon has 3 devices, the drive itself and two memory units
the two memory units don’t detect with the Toshiba UDF 2.5 driver. But the main drive itself does. Or at least it does on most systems.

yeah its all a bunch of crap why dou you even belive the hype its just a stunt to take away from the ps 3 release everyone should know that the ps3 is the fourfont of new gaming and will hold that record for a long time and why would any of you people believe cheap is better cheaper is not always better you get what you pay for xbox 360 hd drive and toshiba hddvd crap bluyray is going to be the standerd in hd players why would al the major companies be jumping on the banwagging if it wasnt i would not bet against it and if i were you i would put stock in it i am and we will see 5 years from now who was right!! sony no match the best of the best!!!!

Will this drive work on a PS3? how cool would that be to have a console that can play Hd-DVD and blue-ray!!!!

To Sony Fanboys, i’ve been a Sony buyer for as long i can care to remember, got TVs, VCRs, DVDs, Receivers, PSX, PS2, PSP, you name it, love RPGs on PSX and PS2, but when i witnessed the how the PS3 is looking so far, the launch line-up, the graphics (you just can’t compare Resistance to Gears of War, GoW alone could crush the PS3 in a snap) and the pricepoint, i am not afraid to say the PS3 may well repeat the story of the NeoGeo, or the Dreamcast.

Now, dont get me wrong, i love my Dreamcast , still have it in my living room, and is not like the PS3 is doomed already, is just i don’t think it will be the great console we hoped it to be, plus they still have a long road to travel to get their online gaming system up to par with what is available right now…

Asi que jumpmancerros, nada de “hype”, ni nada de “fourfront”, y mucho menos nada de “bluyray is going to be the standerd in hd players”, eso si es hype, megasonyfanboy, hehehe

MADSAT

I have a WinXP PC and an Apple Tower. I’m wondering why Apple’s Final Cut Pro HD and DVD Studio Pro allows a user to format and burn content onto HD DVDs, but doesn’t allow them to play back on the same machine. Someone mentioned this would be cured with the release of the Leopard operating system. Does anyone know when that will be? Thanks.

” PS3 is doomed already ” you have must of been born with only one side of your brain , you must be the dumbest person on the face of the earth only a nimrod would even posses the that kind of ignorience to say something like that give me a break the dreamcast failed in so many aspects there were so many problems with that system and why it failed! so please and for gears of war one game alone can not carry on a system everywhere you go you have people selling there xbox 360 ebay local paper ads even when i was driving around my block on saturday i saw posters of people trying to sell there xbox360 as if it were for garage sale ! ps3 is on its third generation gameing system and will be around for a long time and the ps3 is by far the most advanced system out look at japan look at the turn out it was a mad house mr pricepoint ebay is selling preorder ps3 preorder ones for about 1700 $ give me a break people have no limit when buying a qaulity system! quality please how can you compare a true hd system gaming system with a fake hd one like i said there is only two manfacutres sony and toshiba who have hd players not microsoft and toshiba does not even compare to the quality or performance of bluray 50gb storage on one disk double side of course 1080p 5.1 surround sound please nothing compares to it! so dont come in with your nonsense trying to compare it to a piece of crap dreamcast!!! or xbox !!!! to ps3

If you are old enough to remember Betamax then you will understand why people see history repeating itself. Save your money buy xbox 360 and stick with HD format. Marketing is everything and the masses whom are not as technologically informed as us the term Blue-Ray will not make it to the breakfast table, while the simplistic “HD” term every elementary kid knows. And the masses as well as $$ determine what product will live or die not the Technological few. For all those who will buy the BetaMax…I mean PS3 I am laughing at you….Well we are all laughing at you.

lol! i can never understand the mentality of fanboys. foaming at the mouth spouting OMG PS3 IS THE PWNSOR!!!!!!1111oneoneone11. you have no first hand or even reliable reviews of blueray vs hddvd yet you’re happy to pretend you know. sony have had a shit 2 years and they’re going from sucky to shit.. samsung is owning them in all their tradional markets, so we’ll see if their delayed console will manage to live up to the hype..

At jumpmancerros23,

Have you heard of Betamax? It was involved in a format war with VHS. VHS won. Care to know who made Betamax? Sony did. Sony also made the UMD. Both were proprietary formats, and both failed. Both are pretty superior for what they were/are, but they lost out. Higher quality does not always mean better.

jumpmancerros23: With all due respect, could you perhaps incorporate a little punctuation into your writing? At the moment it just looks like a stream of ill-informed conciousness.

Or, frankly, ill-informed everything.

An HD medium simply refers to ‘high-definition’. That’s currently set as being either 720p or 1080p, and the fact that there are two different definitions for ‘high-definition’ itself clouds the issue further.

Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are not in themselves capable of producing ‘high-definition’ – they are simply capable of storing sufficient amounts of data to store media in HD-format for an acceptable amount of time. It doesn’t matter if the device supplying it is external or internal, or whether it’s Blu-Ray or HD-DVD.

…and frankly, given that a vast proportion of folks don’t quite get HD yet, it doesn’t matter one iota.

The fact that eBay has pre-order PS3s (or at least a tenuous promise of getting your hands on a PS3) doesn’t mean anything other than supply vs hype and demand. Xbox 360s sold for ridiculous sums of money when they came out as well.

The bottom line is content. If you feel you can’t live without next-gen, get whatever systems which do what YOU want to do with them, be it a 360, a Wii, a PS3, or any combination of past, present, or ‘next’-gen.

jumpmancerros23, way to kill a thread. You have no cogent arguments in there, merely speculation and falsehoods.

ps3 will sell plenty. it’s still far from being the top dog. It’s a year late, and hey, have you got one yet? I didn’t think so. In fact, are you going to get one soon? I wouldn’t bet on it. What this means is that sony have done themselves huge harm, and will take years to break even. Who cares where sony are in 5 years. The ps3 and 360 will be on the way out, and the amount either company makes is irrelevant. You’ll get poorer, whichever you choose.

You might get to play some games, and both will have plenty. Neither will bow out, and both will keep jabbing at each other throughout, and you’ll be contributing for free.

bluray vs hddvd? some will buy one, some the other, some both. It’s a non-issue which one is better, it’s all about suckling on the consumer’s teat with jargon, hype and babble. We’ll have higher res tech to 1080p in 3-4 years, and probably different hardware. Plus, how big is your TV? how much more time will you spend watching it? will the movie be any better? *shrugs*

xbox360 is 1080p. It works on the hardware, how is it “false” 1080p. It’s all about putting sony in their place. The games, the video, it all works. Stil, the PS3 and 360 will have trouble making their best looking games the HD ones, ’cause there’s jus’ too many pixels. Hardware is roughly equivalent, with more bells and whistles for sony, but not very big ones, and you’re paying for them. 360 gfx are slightly more next gen, shared ram is a better idea, but they’re both roughly equivalent. PC eats both alive at the high end. How would you like 1600p with 32AA? more expensive, but you sound like you have more money than sense in your posts :P

I like the ps3 in essence, but sony to me rhymes with snobbery. They tok the customers for a ride, makin us hang on for something that would never have been ready as soon as the xbox, and they are really fighting to get good PR from the launch. Sure it’s in demand, but only because people want to make money off of it, as they did with the 360. Launching in those numbers was meant to create demand. Instead they created chaos. Mark my words, it’s going to be hell trying to get one.

meanwhile, the 360 has been out for a year, and games are plentiful, and the online community is picking up. I want to play GOW and Dead rising, they appeal, and I could play them tomorrow, if I was to buy a 360.

Also, don’t miss out on the wii, it’s no hot rod, but this is the console that might finally get you laid. People will have ‘moments’ on wii…

Dreamcast was superb. It gave me soulcalibur. speak of it ill and I will rip your heart from your chest. It was also graphically superior to the PS2, as was the xbox. No DVD, cheaper build, but awesome, and yes, better gfx. In fact, so did the gamecube, strictly speaking. Games aren’t all about graphics, nor are they about processing power or hidef DVD drives that serve as accessories to have one up on the next guy.

I love videogames, not brands. I will never pledge alliegiance to a company like microsoft or sony. They’re after my money, like everyone else.

be a free soul, play games, but don’t spend your life or effort being a fan for an inanimate object. Take a step back from it, and count your chips. If you have enough, choose one and find someone to play it with.

tory is smart. He actually has sense embedded into his main memory. It must be shared memory, which would explain its superfast awesomeness!!!

All who oppose Microsoft… no one cares but people who pledge their hard-earned money(sigh) to an inanimate object. A name is ethereal.

Personally, I have the 360. I like Halo too much to go with Sony on this one. Last-gen, I had all the big consoles. Once I got my copy of Halo 1&2 for Xbox, I was hooked. So, that worked out magically, since the 360 is, in terms of comparison, a fairly powerful system, and in the middle lane for pricing.

Still, PC could completely rip both of them to their doom with an appetite to spare. Try soon-to-be 2400p with 64AA!!(muah ha ha ha ha ha).

Someone said Xbox 360 was not “true” hd? Please, like your PS3 is…. so dim-witted, you fanboys.

PC> PS3+XB360+ Wii+ the USA’s “electronics”(like that’ll ever happen)

To bad no one game for the PS3 will max it out on everything
I see sony online is going to fail for sometime as in microsoft, computers, OS as in server os
microsoft got xbox live runing almost 365 24 7 the offtime are for maitnence
I am goin to point and laugh at sony when they use some microsoft product in there servers
and 50gb per disk so what….many deveolpers will not fill it up to the max
Name some killer apps for the PS3
in the end i see Xbox 360 next the WII then in last PS3
and the xbox 360 got many gread new next gen thing for it
I wish i had a HD TV then i would have a HD-DVD drive and laugh at PS3 owners with there blue ray ( it will too expensive bo cause not many will trust it or buy it)
i thinck of sony as a camcoreder or tv not game system
Ps3 may be better in some ways but the xbox 360 has proven itself and anyhting the PS3 had the 360 will soon have it or it already did

Xbox 360 halo 3 and xbox live HD-DVD is all i need to say

PS3 games dont know Blue-ray not proven online will fail (just as it did with the one online game for gamecube)

I’d just like to say AMEN to Tory, this person has it dead on.

Guy at work with plenty of discretionary income got the Samsung BluRay and the Toshiba HD-DVD right when they came out. Both have needed firmware updates. The HD-DVD is connected to internet, and when commanded connects to some upload sight and freshens itself up (e.g. loads latest table of legit disks to keep bootlegers at bay). For instance we put the KING KONG xbox bonus disk in the Toshiba HD-DVD and it would not play until the online update was completed (took about 30min).
The damn BluRay requires you to go to a PC, download a file, burn a disk, then very carefully follow procedures putting in the BluRay player to update it.
IT SUCKS enough that us average users have to suffer through updates to keep bootlegging down, it suck lots more that BluRay makes you go burn a CD/DVD on your PC!!!!
** The HD DVD combo disk, having both convintional DVD and HD-DVD on one disk will most likely provide the superior solution in the market place…. Even though theoretically BluRay is slightly better than HD-DVD (can you say VHS vs. Beta)
My guess is that BluRay will slowly die out, an Orphan of the future, BUT HAY BETA lasted 20 years, RIGHT!

I never killed the discussion I just stated my opinion but when you get little kids who work at McDonalds trying to oppose you and say you probably cant afford a ps3 i have to step in and say you killed the discussion with all you lame tackles and so called facts and assumptions as stated in the beginning of the discussion it was about a hd drive for your pc I have stated that in my remarks until all of you had step in and talk about gaming and Sony and blue ray which not fail in the future and will be the leader in hd drives and players guarantee so when my stock in bluray rises and you get fired at McDonalds and burger king maybe I will lend you some money !!!! Blu-ray Disc

Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD), is the name of a next-generation optical disc format jointly developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), a group of the world’s leading consumer electronics, personal computer and media manufacturers (including Apple, Dell, Hitachi, HP, JVC, LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK and Thomson). The format was developed to enable recording, rewriting and playback of high-definition video (HD), as well as storing large amounts of data. The format offers more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs and can hold up to 25GB on a single-layer disc and 50GB on a dual-layer disc. This extra capacity combined with the use of advanced video and audio codecs will offer consumers an unprecedented HD experience.

While current optical disc technologies such as DVD, DVD±R, DVD±RW, and DVD-RAM rely on a red laser to read and write data, the new format uses a blue-violet laser instead, hence the name Blu-ray. Despite the different type of lasers used, Blu-ray products can easily be made backwards compatible with CDs and DVDs through the use of a BD/DVD/CD compatible optical pickup unit. The benefit of using a blue-violet laser (405nm) is that it has a shorter wavelength than a red laser (650nm), which makes it possible to focus the laser spot with even greater precision. This allows data to be packed more tightly and stored in less space, so it’s possible to fit more data on the disc even though it’s the same size as a CD/DVD. This together with the change of numerical aperture to 0.85 is what enables Blu-ray Discs to hold 25GB/50GB.

Blu-ray is currently supported by more than 170 of the world’s leading consumer electronics, personal computer, recording media, video game and music companies. The format also has broad support from the major movie studios as a successor to today’s DVD format. Seven of the eight major movie studios have already announced titles for Blu-ray, including Warner, Paramount, Fox, Disney, Sony, MGM and Lionsgate. The initial line-up is expected to consist of over 100 titles and include recent hits as well as classics such as Batman Begins, Desperado, Fantastic Four, Fifth Element, Hero, Ice Age, Kill Bill, Lethal Weapon, Mission Impossible, Ocean’s Twelve, Pirates of the Caribbean, Reservoir Dogs, Robocop, and The Matrix. Many studios have also announced that they will begin releasing new feature films on Blu-ray Disc day-and-date with DVD, as well as a continuous slate of catalog titles every month.

try to speculate on these facts and tell me if all the major companies are just simple minded as me when they two are going to use blu-ray!!!! and for me i dont believe i am millionare but i dont think working at costco as a manager making 70 thousand a year with no college degree is not to shabby! and yes i will be able to purchase one at work at 699.99 bundle pack with some extra goodies is pretty dam good give me your address and why not i will buy you one since i am nice guy and i know your income at mcdonlads put you in a bad spot to buy one so enjoy all your lame attacks on me for just simply stated my opinnions and dont loose site of what the really topic was hd player for your pc(so who really killed the topic me or you !!!!! MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

o yeah who cares if i mispelled some words who needs education when i am living comfortable with my income with no education and who cares if you make more then me i still love working at costco so i will leave this discussion with this final post enjoy fairwell and bash me for all my mispelled words and whatever you want i will be enjoyng my ps3 on my 50 rear projection sony tv and i will post pictures if all you haters dont believe me my tv ps3 and my tax papers stating my income for last year once again enjoy well educated people!!!! god bless and happy holidays

Dude your TV is Sony 50 inch, well mine is an 82″ Mitsubishi LCoS and guess what! Im only 18 and dont have a job but I have successful parents, oh and I’m going to collage soon so I dont care for any of you posting flaming comments about my 82″ HDTV.

Sony Also Made the:
Compact Disc, CD, and CD Drives (The most popular format in the world)
Don’t forget their hand in DVDs either.

Sony will win the war.

As of December you will be able to buy a standalone blu-ray player for $320. And it won’t be using the crappy HV-1 codec that HD-DVDs are in. It’s the codec that MS invented so they didn’t have to pay any fees to the MPEG group. Even though I work for a film studio, which I have access to original masters of….

You should see the difference in quality between an h.264 encoded movie (MPEG 4) which was worked on for years by thousands of people, and not just MS for the last 1 months.

HV-1 Smooths everything and takes away the original film grain of the master film. MPEG lets you see what an original master is like, which some of you might not like because you dont’ want to see the film grain or the little details like they were meant to be seen.

Not to mention if sony wants they can use the HV-1 codec on blu-ray if they wanted to….

But they are sticking with a codec thats been worked on by engineers for 10 years, and updated and checked over time. Over 40 billion dollars (YES 40 billion dollars) has gone into developing MPEG-2, MPEG4 h.264, and less than 12 MILLION into HV-1.

I’ll gladly demo the difference for people, if you want your movies pre-encoded with NOISE REDUCTION in the film then stick with HD-DVD because that’s what you will get.

If you want to see exactly what came off the reel WHEN THE director filmed it then go to blu-ray, and if you don’t like the grain you can always turn on noise reduction in the new players (dont’ use the samsung one, it’s bad) AND it will be just like HD-DVD.

Studios Promising Blu-Ray:
*Warner Bros (said they will offer HD-DVD if demand, switched from originally offering only HD-DVD)
*Paramount
*Sony
*Sony BMG
*Universal (also plans to support HD-DVD)
*Disney

and a bunch of other studios I’m forgetting…

Not to mention a 20gb HD-DVD can only have one region encoded on it… At a lower bandwidth to fit the content.

with Blu-Ray you can have one disc for every country…

lol excuse my spelling im typing while watching The Man Show on G4TV its kool!

As far as the XBox360 vs. Playstation don’t count these as the HD players. These are NOT the players people are going to be buying to play movies. A majority of people (the geeks not on sites like these) will be buying regular players.

The XBox360 and Playstation 3 are gaming consoles don’t forget that. Why not plug in the USB HD-DVD drive into your playstation 3? hehe I’m sure there will be an ADD on for that…

I have an XBox360 and just got my test Playstation 3 yesterday. I thought the graphics would be slightly better, but they really do in all honesty BLOW me away. It’s the first console that doesn’t render polgons as you get closer to objects. It’s a HUGE difference between the XBox360 and the Playstation 3, just check out some of the reviews, they are “Suprised” at how crazy good the difference is in graphic quality.

I will go out and buy one the INSTANT someone figures out how to use this drive for HD-DVDs on my Macbook Pro. Yeah.

Does anyone know if the beta OSX Leopard software has the HD-DVD player built in?

“jumpmancer”: learn to argue. pasting facts from wikipedia does not qualify as “arguing”. in order to argue between the next generation consoles, one must have actually played the consoles and have a decent knowledge of what content is going to be available for said console for a good duration of its lifespan, and guess what? nobody knows that. so why doesn’t everyone just shut up and stop making themselves look like ludicrously loyal inbred morons?

you never actually qualified what it was about the ps3 that is going to put it at the “fourfront” of gaming. is it the hugely overhyped and intentionally overcomplicated “cell” processor that doesn’t work properly? or is it the graphics output which has bigger numbers than the 360s but is, as someone’s already pointed out, just a 7800, which would make it worse than the graphics card currently residing in my decicedly not next-gen computer? or wait, maybe it’s the blu-ray capability which i’m sure you’ll love, as it’ll give you a chance to blow some of that massive income you have on buying all your favourite movies again in a higher resolution, only to find in two years when there’s actually a sizeable market for HD movies that a new, better, cheaper format has emerged and both BD and HD-DVD are dead? well, i know that has absolutely nothing to do with gaming, but your points have nothing to do with logic, so i figure i’m probably shooting in the right direction.

jumpmancer reminds me of the college-milk-boy from Tokio Drift. “Wow, you can read the manual”.

I think he is despaired and just needs a friend or someone who cares about him..

self-disqualified

Hey, to get this back to the subject of playing HD movies on a computer (and not worrying about who has a larger TV or who will win the format war), I’d like to mention that there’s software available from Cyberlink that you can only get with the serial number from your Sony BWU-100A Blu-Ray drive. Does anyone else know anything about this? I just got one of these drives and am putting the rest of the computer together around it, so I should be able to review that software shortly. Still, if anyone else knows anything, I’d like to hear it. If it also supports HD-DVD, it may be what we need to use until WinDVD8 supports HD playback in english (and at full resolution).

However the fate of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, I say cheers to this “hack” (not a hack) and thanks for helping in driving the prices of HD-DVD players down!!!!!

Philips made the CD togeather with Sony.

Ehh, you know, in 18 months to 2 years we’ll have a clearer picture of who exactly wins the HD-DVD vs. Blueray battle, if Blueray wins and I have to dump my $170 360 add-on box due to a lack of support, I’m not going to lose a whole lot of sleep over it. Whenever you jump headfirst into new tech like this, you have to realize there’s always the chance it’s going to fail and you’ll have a nice doorstop for your troubles. In retrospect, a $170 doorstop rates pretty far down the line as far as other tech I’ve jumped into over the years.

Jumpmancerros, learn to write a goddamn sentence. I won’t insult your spelling, just your sorry excuse for grammar. You know, they do have run-on sentences in other languages so it isn’t exactly just English that appears to be your problem. Rather your problem seems to be putting any cohesive thought down that appears to be your own. As for your living comfortably with the luxuries of high-end technology, I’m glad stupid people can afford to live nicely, but this was already proven when we elected a retard twice to the highest office in the nation.

You know i’m in on this. Subscribed with Google Reader.

Oh man…

“Sony will win the war.”

Sony are at WAR with us? RUN!!!!! (seriously though, put your mp3′s away…)

Thanks for the love.

Hey jumpmncer, your sony shares are on the up, at last, and you helped! Maybe one day Sony will reward you.

guys, hi-def, hi-schmef, here’s a tip: If you can, get a projector. Your friend gets a 100′ TV, you pull your projo back an inch and voila, 110′. You’ll always have a bigger TV, as long as you have space.

hahah, just read the bit about the income tax – go on post em, and the receipt, and the pic, somewhere we can all see!

I want to be able to congratulate you in between flipping patties and serving fries. Money earned at McDonalds is money from work nonetheless. And I love my job. I get to stockpile ketchup for the day the world goes dark and cold.

face it.
You buy hardware now, and in 10 years, you’ll be going “awww, remember when they could only do this?? And those silly discs?? Here, let’s have a game”

and your kids will go “no, and we never will remember, because we’d never touch your cacky relic console POS with a barge pole, get us some real hardware!”

…And then, you will be a man my son.

This is cool. Although it looks like a lot of work having to transfer the HD-DD card from one unit to another.

jumpmancer seems like he’s a know it all. He seems to think that Blu-ray is the bomb-xorz. Well I suggest to jumpman to look up Holographic Versatile Disk (HVD). That is the current end all be all of optical media (to my knowledge). While still in its early stages of development, it has a theoritical maximum of 3.6 (3.something, can’t recall the exact decimal) TB, thats terabytes for those that dont know (and for those that really dont know, a terabyte is 1024 times greater than a gigabyte). Just 6 of ‘em could possibly store the Library of the U.S. Congress (without images).

To keep this post on topic, Im sure that I’ll buy one of the X360′s HD-DVD drives when I get my new computer next year (with Vista, no less).

remember the mini disk !

Is it possible to put HD-DVD reader inside Set-Top Box AVC/VC-1 compatible like netgear (SMP8635 video chipset)?

Buy American. Support our Country, our Companies, our Future.

Thanks Xbox!!!
===========

Toshiba’s American?

===========

No but doesnt PRC stand for peoples republic of china

nero 7 ultra edtion supports HD-DVD, has a player in it too

uds son increibles!!!!!, los felicito. you are fantastic. congratulations

Once again you guys seem to lose the point of the article in your PS3 vs 360 bitchfest. The fact here is I tried it and the drivers didn’t work with XP and OSX didn’t recoginize it at all. How many of you even have a 360 HD-DVD drive? I do.

Joker5….I think PRC stands for ‘People with Real Children workers’…could be wrong though.

>Jumpmancerros, learn to write a goddamn sentence.

Should be:

“Jumpmancerros, you should learn to how to properly construct a goddamned sentence.”

>You know, they do have run-on sentences in other languages so it isn’t exactly >just English that appears to be your problem.

Should be:

“You know, they do have run on sentences in other languages, so it appears that English is not your only problem.”

>Rather your problem seems to be putting any cohesive thought down that >appears to be your own.

Should be:

“Rather, it seems your problem is expressing any cohesive thought of your own.”

>As for your living comfortably with the luxuries of high-end technology, I’m glad >stupid people can afford to live nicely, but this was already proven when we >elected a retard twice to the highest office in the nation.

Should be:

“As for your living comfortably while enjoying the luxuries of high-end technology, I’m glad that stupid people can afford to live nicely. But this was already proven when a retard was twice elected to the highest office in the nation.”

With a little time and patience, s8ist, you’ll soon learn to mock the communication difficulties of others effectively and coherently. Until then, I’d stick to expressing your opinions and leave others be.

I think that “Blue_Ray” or Blue Gay will be a nice little market. But Bubba that goes and buys a DVD from Wal-Mart for 5 dollars and is happy with his AMPEX DVD player will not spend the money for a BLUE Ray player or want to replace his collection of 200 movies. I purchased a Mini Disk player back in 1997 and I loved it, but it was a pain in the ass to make mix disks b/c u had to go real time to do it. IT never caught on and I still own it, but it gathers dust. I use my Creative Zen to listen to music. I can encode a MPG file to 780i and play it on my computer with my hardware setup. It works. I never was a gamer so XboX and PS3 whatever they can do, don’t do it for me. I have lots better things to do with my money than spend $600 for a mindless game box. Blur Ray or DH DVD, when your are old your eyes will not be able to tell the difference and your blown out eardrums will not be able to listen to Dolby10.1 THX DTS stuff.

Jumpmancerros23, I’ve tried reading your posts but the lack of punctuation, capitalization, and spelling errors has made it too painful. I’m grateful that you at least included spaces between the words. I’d like to hear what you have to say but I can’t make it through your posts.

There is no superior system, only a superior demand.

Get a Wii. LOL

Alright…So, first-off, the topic of this thread is pretty cool. (If it does indeed work, I’ll have to try it out sooner than later…)

But intriguing as the possibility of the 360’s HD-DVD drive working on other platforms is, what really struck me from this whole debate was Tory’s first post. Damn… That was the most unbiased, honest, insightful and technically correct posting I’ve read in a LONG time.

Really, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of relief after reading this. Being that up until this post all I seem to come across is uninformed and dishonest fan-boy ramblings that really don’t give a balanced perspective…on anything!

I don’t really see how anything could come close to a worthwhile, justified rebuttal against your post.

Again: Tory, excellent post. Beers are on me.

There you go:
http://www.avaxhome.ru/software/windvdplatinum8final.html

The deal is this. Xbox 360 is great, but only will put out 1080i period no 1080p. Also no HDMI support which is everything to you & me if we want the best picture. I still have hope for HDMI on the 360, but outlook is not so good.
Sony PS3 supports 1080p on movies, but not on games for now. Also the PS3 can be used as a internet browser to surf the web which in my opinion is a pretty big plus for the PS3. The Xbox 360 can’t even do that.
I now own both systems. I have a 61″ DLP that supports 1080p. I have played both and I got to tell you that the PS3 blows the xbox 360 out of the water hands down. Now if this is true and the HD-DVD player works on the pc as well. Then Microsoft may be saved, because in the end the PS3 is cheaper than the xbox 360 if you want the HD-DVD player as well. So if you don’t have a system yet then I strongly recommend the PS3 over the 360 based on picture quality and features especially if you have a tv that puts out 1080p.

After reading all these posts I was imagining where God came into all this (please don’t get offended by this – its just a semi-comical-pseudo-religious-comment):

Do XBox360 fanboys goto XBox Heavens, Do PS3 fanboys goto PS3 Heavens?

I wondered if there was a heaven with black cooling fins, black grilled gates and halos made out of black plastic with the RGB PS logo and a big Sony sign at the back. I also dreamt of the equivalent XBox360 heaven with white and green lining everything in sight, pictures of bill gates, a green halo and a big microsoft sign with a hyperlink to open up an instance of the Windows Vista heaven.

- I hope you understand what I’m trying to say… if you don’t… don’t worry… neither do I!

This fan stuff is getting pretty boring and almost evangelical. However, I do respect the fact that they are your own opinions and thank you all for expressing them so millitantly.

I don’t remember this problem when I was deciding to buy a Sega Master System or a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), but we never had the internet back then. I bought the Sega because I wanted to play Alex Kid in Miracle World and Sonic the Hedgehog, and not Super Marios Bros. But hey I never debated it with anyone. I think this conversation is testament to the internet and its contribution to harmony and world piece – i’m rambling!!

Getting back to the point {I keep digressing}

In terms of Console Wars: The console with the cool games will win. These are things like Gears of War and Halo 3 (xbox360 – correct me if I’m wrong) and whatever the “PS3 only titles” are for the PS3. technical ability, gfx and sound are not the only factors.

In terms of Format Wars: I think MS and Sony have a lot to say in this as gamers will be a big factor in deciding the outcome, as standalone players will be less attractive; with their high prices and limited functionality compared to the consoles. Who will win – no one knows – and no one can really predict. But all I can say is if you want your favourite format to win the format war just advertise it, tell your mates, make a website, start a fanclub and make a TV station about it. But please… please… don’t get into very hurtfull and saddening debates as it is really sad to see such a really good post digress into a slag-off session. Be constructive not destructive :)

i will end with a quote from a hippy I met at a legalise c********* conference in Nimbin, NSW, Australia:

God gave us peace, love and harmony when he/she/it created the Earth and the Universe around it… why destroy it… chill… be happy your here… thats the real miracle!

Yeah, I am trying linux tonight.

KG –
Obviously you don’t keep up with the news. The last update for the 360 enabled 1080p, also if you do a little research you’ll find that the real reason anyone wants HDMI is mostly for audio during HD-DVD playback. HDMI connections offer very lttle upgrade of picture quality if any, and some displays convert the digital signal back to a analog signal meaning that component looks better. I also have both, hooked up to a Toshiba 72mx196, and for you saying that the PS3 blows the 360 away should really be reconsidered.

Here, you can start your research here. http://dpad.gotfrag.com/portal/story/35372/?cpage=1

One last thing 1080i60 = 1080p

umm 1st off, 1080p CAN eqaul 1080i60, IF its 1080p30.

For movies it will never make a difference, since they are almost all going to be 24fps. So its going to be have be changed somewhere… to a 60fps.

The ps3 games coming out right now are in general better looking the the xbox 360 launch… But really there is nothing special about the titles. I’m glad madden did not get amputated like the launch madden for the 360.. Tony hawk did.

I belive that in general Blu-Ray is a techincally better format then HD-DVD. BUT realistically speaking ethier format can win.

There is NO point in getting the HD-DVD drive for the 360 if you do not have a hdtv.

I actually just picked up the 360 HDDVD drive, and watched King Kong. IMHO its awesome looking and sounding. I really dont care anymore which format wins. HD video is better then DVD video. For now i’m going to buy HD movies because I have that player.

When I have a ps3, i’ll get blu-ray movies. I just hope some great titles come out for ethier. I would love a hi-def lord of the rings, or matrix, or the new star wars.

I could really care less about if its blu-ray or hd-dvd. And I used to be a blu-ray fan boy. Give me one or the other.

I can see this battle being very drawn out. HD-DVD has a head start and the 360 support.

Blu-ray will/is getting a major boost from the ps3 sales. In fact they are probably many more blu-ray players out there then hd-dvd. But yes most gamers will not buy alot of movies. but even a handfull can make a huge change.

Maybe the dual-format players will comeout, and all will be well.

As for 360 vs ps3 gaming. From all reports IF you have a 1080p tv then 1080p games from the ps3 looking amazing if not better then the 360. If you do not have a 1080p tv, then its a draw. The PS3 is capable of better looking visuals then the 360 AT a higher resolution. But in general the 2 are very close , with lower resolutions going to the 360 due to the ‘free’ AA

Mike –

Please read the link I provided It will make you rethink your comment on PS3 having better look ing visuals at 1080p. As of now we really don’t have anything to compare to on the 360 so we won’t be able to test.

I couldn’t find a link but yesterday while reading erview of PS3 vs. 360 launch titles I seem to recall gamespi.com giving the nod to the 360. Also I don’t see a problem with comparing PS3 launch titles to current release titles of the 360, because IMO the only thing that delayed the PS3 is BLU-RAY. And, if you were to do that then the 360has advantages in THPS, COD3, and a few others I can’t recall.

I really don’t care either I just do like fanboys 1 sided opinions.

And, yes 1080i60 = 1080p30 if your TV correctly deinterlaces the pic. Sorry I wasn’t clearer.

If you have the Xbox 360 fall update all 1080i games can now be played natively at 1080p if you screen supports it. So PS3 Fan boys ain’t got that amunition anymore lol.

Well, I finally managed to read my way through this thread, and have to say thanks to all those who have provided meaningfull information. (mind you, flame wars make for a fun read too).

Personally, i can’t wait for the xbox hd-dvd drive to be released here. As an early adopter, it seems by far the cheapest way to view HD media right now.

Something to think on also is that all HD drives are first generation drives. The technology is new in both HD-DVD and BD, which means ther are going to be ‘niggles’ with whatever option you go for. Another looming issue will be wear and tear. Watching lots of movies is very taxing on the drives, and the result is that these drives WILL cook themseves to death in a few years time. How many people remember killing the dvd drives in their ps2 from watching all of those new fangled dvd thinges? Id rather have to relace an external drive in a couple of years time, rather than replace a whole ps3.

Anyway, thats my two bits worth. All i want is some good content to make use of my HD TV. Unfortunately, HD on the PC (my prefered option) is a bit of arse right now, with no hope in sight untill the manstream gfx cards get kitted out with hdcp as standard, As it is, 130 quid for an xbox add-on seems pretty damn cheap to me.

BTW – for the fanboys here, checkout hardcoreware.net:

http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-348-1.htm

There’s a great article there headed ‘Playstation 3 vs XBOX 360: A Developer’s Perspective’

…here’s a few snippets for those who can’t be arsed to click there

“Being a video game developer (I develop for both, Playstation 3 and XBOX 360) people ask me almost daily which platform I think is better. These are my personal feelings, in no way does this reflect my employer.

Short answer: XBOX 360.

Long answer: Price, performance, visual quality, game selection and online support. I think the XBOX 360 wins in every category.

Price: This is obvious; the XBOX 360 core is only $299. The PS3 is around $499 for the 20GB version. It comes with a hard drive, but you don’t need a hard drive to enjoy a lot of great games on the 360 so I think it’s fair to compare both core systems.

Performance: On paper, the PS3 is more powerful. In reality, it’s quite inferior to the 360. Without getting into too many details, the three general-purpose CPU’s the xbox360 has are currently FAR easier to take advantage of than the SPU’s on the PS3. I suspect a few years down the road some high budget, first party PS3 exclusive titles will come out that really take advantage of the SPU’s and do things the XBOX 360 can’t, but I don’t think the console is worth buying based on this speculation (for some it will be though, we’ll have to wait and see how these games turn out).

Graphics: The XBOX 360 is a clear winner. The GPU is more powerful. It has more powerful fillrate, and far more pixel and vertex processing horsepower. Part of the reason is their choice of memory, and architecture of pixel and vertex procesing. I can’t get into details but the same vertex shader will run much slower on the PS3 than the XBOX 360. The 360 also has a clever new way rendering high definition anti aliased back buffers. To accomplish the same effect on PS3 is prohibitively expensive. For this reason I think many games will have no choice but to run in non-HD resolutions on the PS3 version, use a lower quality anti aliasing technique, or do back buffer upscaling. The end result in all cases is going to be noticeably worse image quality.”

DiscoGodfather, many (but not all) of your “grammar corrections” were only stylistic changes. For instance, your last change was simply a conversion from active to passive voice. The active voice is generally preferred, although, depending on what one wishes to emphasize, the passive voice may be more appropriate.

Regardless, the point of the message was that the posts made by Jumpmancerros have been difficult to read (generally due to poor use of English grammar and specifically due to a lack of any punctuation). The online community has learned to accept typographical errors (including yours DiscoGodfather and mine), but we must draw the line at the total elimination of punctuation.

Hi,
after all, in case you finished your unproductive flame wars and had time to to test a mini 50p to IDE 40 adapter, did it work?

mike

Hey I was wondering if you got the HD DVD Drive to work with windows and mac…. would it also be able to work on linux?

Just my 2cents on the 360 vs PS3 thing, PS3 still has a jump up being that the 360′s output is analog and PS3 offers analog and digital (via HDMI). Personally I don’t care, I am a fan of a PS3 but it’s going to take them at least a year to get off their feet and even then there will always be things the 360 will do better. Unless Amazon does a weekly run of non-core 360s (175$ sounds about right), probably won’t buy one until I at least get my hands on a PS3 and some good games (which won’t be coming out until next year anyway).

- Tony R.

The hell with all this PS3 vs 360 sh*t!!

Anyone with some HD-DVD playback software we can test on our PC’s?
I’ll PayPal someone for working software.

Meanwhile, the Wii sneaks in while the 360 and PS3 duke it out with games and gameplay. I like eye candy just like everyone else, but Nintendo pushed more units than the PS3 already and they make a direct profit from each console sale. To top that, they are known for making games that are addicting and challenging. Who cares if the graphics aren’t as good….

The best bang for your buck ou there is the xbox 360 core system. Its 299 and is far superior to the WII. Lets see, more game selection, at least 2 times the processer power and a gaming network that is established.

So a WII for $250 or a xbox 360 for $300. I will spend the extra $50 and get a far SUPERIOR SYSTEM!!!! Although if money was no object I would like to have all 3 systems,

XBOX 360 wins with my funds.

The best bang for your buck out there is the xbox 360 core system. Its 299 and is far superior to the WII. Lets see, more game selection, at least 2 times the processer power and a gaming network that is established.

So a WII for $250 or a xbox 360 for $300. I will spend the extra $50 and get a far SUPERIOR SYSTEM!!!! Although if money was no object I would like to have all 3 systems,

XBOX 360 wins with my funds.

can you put the xbox 360 drive inside the original xbox

Would this fly?

Xbox 360 HD-DVD Peripheral
Above mentioned hack
Sapphire HDMI (HDCP Enabled) Radeon X1600 PCIX Card
42″ HDTV

Would that work, cause I was looking at one in the store, and the guy told me that if I am thinking of just pluging it in the computer not to bother because the microsoft rep told them it won’t work (HD-DVD Player).

Webterractive heres what i know and would assume to work in theory and ill explain why it should… Xbox 360 HD-DVD player can be hooked up to your PC VIA USB. So lets say for instance i had one and hooked it up. My monitor is the Dell 2405 (doesnt support HDCP and its doesnt matter at this point someday it might) and is hooked up VIA DVI through my 9800XT Graphics card.
IF i downloaded the Windvd 8 and my computer was fast enough to decode the AACS format then if i put in a HD-DVD it should play perfectly fine on my Monitor via DVI connection. This works because the ICF better known as the movie industry’s way to limit playback of of HD-DVD and BR DVDs isnt enabled yet. But lets say in the yr 2010 they start to enable the ICF check … the HD DVD player will not play VIA DVI because there is no HDCP copy protection.

The only other downfall of playing HD DVD on your pc is the software right out that is out doesnt output at correct resolutions… it only outputs at 520p or something close to that… So your not really getting a great picture.

If you were wanting to go future proof then what you suggested:
Sapphire HDMI (HDCP Enabled) Radeon X1600 PCIX Card and the 42″ HDTV connected via HDMI would work.

Does any one know the bare minimum requirements for a pc to run an hd dvd movie using this player?

Looking for someone that has the measurements of the internals of the video connector. Wanting to reverse the cable and build replacements of varying types with some added features. If you have a connector that you can spare for me to chop apart, contact me and we’ll arrange shipping.

Still haven’t heard a definite answer to the Linux question (wouldn’t it be funny for someone with PS2 Linux Kit to have this on their PS2), or a true PS2 hack, or the already asked PS3 hack, or the Wii (of course with the PS2 or the Wii you could only get 480p and on the Wii only Dolby Pro Logic and then on the PS2 regular Dolby Digital or DTS) or even a hack for the 300-hr TiVo® Series3™ HD or some other high end av device (might need a USB to Firewire adapter). As mentioned earlier the XBOX 360 with the launch of this add-on MS released a patch for 1080p and just yesterday patched problems with it. Some tv’s don’t support 1080p over component though. There is a VGA cable for the 360 (true no DVI or HDMI nor any planned that I know of, just like I don’t think there are any VGA or DVI cables for the PS3). As for HD-DVD vs Blueray discussion I say HD-DVD drive for 360 yes, ps3 yes, other than that wait. I hope it doesn’t go the way of VHS vs. Betamax. Though legal issues are stopping dual format drives unlike what happen with DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW.

Also I forgot to mention about the HD-DVD discs with one side DVD, Bluray is supposed to be able to do that also sometime soon and DVD’s can actually be burned with HD content you just don’t have the space and you still need a HD-DVD player.

Just a quite note for anyone who says that either of these formats is “off the reel” – what the director shot…

I just finished a short film (24 minutes) and transferred it to HD for color correction and effects work… the finished film, with really simple compression, is 365GB.

So if you can squeeze a 2 hour movie, plus features, onto a 25-50GB disk, it’s got at least 6:1 compression on top of whatever ours had to begin with (I think it’s 3:1 or 5:1)… So both blu-ray and HD-DVD are intensely compressed. Think Cheeseburger into a bullion cube.

So as long as both formats are supporting the same resolutions (1080i, 1080p), I doubt you’ll be able to really see much difference between them except for the quality of the codec, which can constantly be upgraded with firmware updates, etc.

I think it’ll come down to a) if more studios actually sign on to one or the other, and b) who’s player comes down the cheapest in cost… that was the deal with BETA… the Beta players were hellishly expensive until it’s last leg anyways. So Beta was doomed. VHS sold it’s technology to everyone, so players kept getting cheaper and cheaper.

I’m definitely considering picking up an XBOX HD-DVD drive in the meantime so I can start picking up the discs and watching them… if there was a PS3 in sight, I’d probably get one too. I doubt there’ll be stock until mid-spring 07 at minimum.

And the XBOX / PS3 arguments are as illuminating as the PEPSI / COKE arguments. I drink both… depending on the day… or whatever restaurant i’m at serves.

And the Intervideo site is saying that WinDVD 8 Platinum has support for VC1, H.264, etc… and up to 1080i resolution… anyone tried this with the hack yet?

And would this work on a decent Mac Intel running XP in bootcamp? I’m thinking it would be the exact same as a regular XP boot.

Hey, maybe if the work out the legal issues, they’ll figure out a way to make dual sided discs. One side HD-DVD, the other Bluray.

Hey All,
I can’t seem to get WMCE 05 to recognize the hack drivers. I’ve downloaded from different mirrors and used WinAce to extract but when it comes to installing them, WMCE will not allow the use of them. When I first boot up, WMCE see’s the drive as an XBOX 360 HD-dvd but under MY Computer it only shows up as a CD drive and cannot be used! Nero 7 however, see’s the drive for what it is and claims it will even accept HD-DVD-R discs but this does no good if WMCE doesn’t recognize it for what it is. My goal for this drive is simple. Since I have the 360 as well which I can use as a media extender, I’m looking to find software to rip HD-DVD’s via this new drive to dedicated library HDD’s in my HTPC which can be played back through the 360. In short, can anyone tell me exactly what I’m doing wrong here and has anyone done what I’m looking to do?

If Linux can get it running you could at least use it on the PS3 with one of the PS3 Linux distros (by the way they have already found a way to rip Bluray movies to the ps3 harddrive in Linux). Also I don’t know if it has the power and it wouldn’t be very portable, but what about a PSP hack.

I have successfully connected the XBOX HDDVD player to my PC via USB. It plays standard DVD’s fine. I have followed your instructions and I have recognition of the contents of the HVDVD_TS folder, but I cannot get the trial versions of WinDVD 8
or PowerDVD 7 to play the disc. Please help!. I don’t know what I am doing wrong.
Thanks a million
Humberto

Whats all this babble about? Systems are systems, I won’t buy PS3 because they simply have it at a too high of a price, I’ll never buy an Xbox360 because of the fact that Microsoft is originally made for PC’s not gaming consoles, They can’t even make Windows properly, I doubt they could make a gaming system right, Now the Wii, I’m considering buying it due to the fact you can buy emulators for it directly from Nintendo itself and play Sega, Nintendo, SNES, N64 and game cube games and the fact is Nintendo doesn’t care as much as Microsoft, and Sony for emulation but Nintendo started it all, Did you all forget your youth? NINTENDO was the first System with wireless controllers, Guns and many other things aswell as their new controller was the biggest step they ever made, Giving the player told FULL control over their characters, turns of a car you name it, and Microsoft and Sony will NEVER EVER be able to use the next-gen controller because of copyright reasons to the Wii, and Nintendo would never be stupid enough to throw there step-up against them easily.
All Nintendo has to do is upgrade its graphics for years to come and their controlers abilities, They could even step up to Virtual Reality gaming in the future, and Wii is… GUESS WHAT Free to play online!, No more subscription fee’s, Nothing but pure gold for its players, Freedom and options.

Does anyone know how I can get this drive to work on a mac running os x 10.4 tiger??

do it through boot camp

DHarley

I have the same issue. My Window’s MCE is not recognising the drivers either.
I have tried everything I can think of to get Microsoft to pick up the drivers. I’m wondering if Microsoft caught on and released a patch to the player or to my Windows MC edition.

Anyone else figure this out?

To add to my previous post….

XP Media Center Edition tends to look to install an “XBox 360 HD DVD Memory Unit” twice, which it can’t find drivers for, even though you specify where they are. It then goes on to attempt to install a Toshiba HD DVD drive. Which it then flashes up as having detected a CD Rom.

In my device Manager I am seeing:
TOSHIBA DVD/HD X807616 USB Device which appears to have installed fine under DVD/CD-ROM Devices.

However under “Other” I have yellow question marks beside “XBox 360 HD DVD Memory Unit”

yea, except I have a power pc. Any suggestions??

Boys boys….whats the point of bringing HD DVD to pc with a crap resolution of 540p.,.. that just sucks,.,,,

keep watching ´em Vhs movies then..

What do you mean 540p? PowerDVD 6.5 support 1080p.. And the final version of this is out online before Christmas. Read the FAQ at Cyberlink.

Poor fredde,

Don’t you just love uninformed people that don’t engage their brain before they overrun their mouths.

I decided to try the experiment.

Purchased an Xbox 260 HD DVD drive from Circuit City for $200 – $40 in-store coupon = $160.
Purchased an HDCP-compatible video card from NewEgg for $199 – $20 MIR = $179.
Downloaded Toshiba HD DVD driver software.
Downloaded latest WinDVD software.
Downloaded latest PowerDVD software.
Total cost: $340.

Test platform: based on Pentium D 3.0 GHz dual-core CPU, 1gb RAM, WinXP SP2.

Results:
HD DVD movie plays, however:
- CPU process meter shows pegged.
- Playback stutters a little.
- Xbox HD DVD remote doesn’t work directly through the HD DVD Drive, thus useless w/o purchase of game console.
- Can’t navigate DVD movie menu via keyboard or mouse control or WinDVD/PowerDVD.
- Operating mode seems to be stuck with picture-in-picture function enabled.
- When DVD navigation switches from FBI warning screen and MPAA rating screen, video freezes (audio continues) when movie starts.

Conclusion:
- I’ll need to find a new way to navigate the DVD menu and features.
- PowerDVD suggests the minimum system requirements include a dual-core 3.2GHz CPU. This upgrade will bring my total investment to over $500, which is too close to the cost of a retail HD DVD player.

Thus I’ve decided to scrub the project and return the hardware for refund. I may re-investigate this option after I’ve made my next CPU upgrade, or simply purchase a component HD-DVD player.

If Blu-ray loses the battle the PS3 will have some huge data space for game data and a nearly impossible to copy game piracy protection because of the lack of BD readers\burners. If HD-DVD loses all of you HD-DVD lovers will have to eat the drive.

Anyone know any software for hd dvds for mac?

i also have wmc, and it does the same as you Mark. I hooked up with usb and installed the windvd8… when i go to play my screen turns into a cluster F of pixles… im unsing dvi out. Then i I also bought the adaptor that plugs into the back of the drive so you can connect a floppy power and IDE to the drive and i cant even get the computer to go through bios. So not sure if that atapi thing works at all then… lmk what you guys think. Stop with the ps3 vs 360 crap wtf is wrong with you guys lol. i sold my ps3 haha

http://www.colordrives.com/cd-rom%20adapter/cd-rom%20adapter-1.jpg
Someone posted to try one of these at the first post.

i used this one below here.
http://store.orbitmicro.com/ccp3096-slim-cd-rom-adapter-cd-adapter–s102142.htm
here i used one of these and now my HD DVD drive doesnt work… plus the computer wouldnt load with this used and my HD DVD drive installed. so anyone else try this and get it to work… i put the HD DVD player back together and connected back to the xbox and when a HD DVD is put in it stays in the READING process on the xbox… so to say the least anyone else confirm this…. i think i toasted my drive.. dang 200 bucks…

I used the floppy power and IDE btw

I got every thing the XBOX60 HD-DVD drive, WinDVD 7, but I cannot still play HD-DVDs. The disc format is not read by Windows. I can read CDs, DVDs but not Hd-DVDs.

Can some one help ?

J-L

I managed to explore my HD-DVD but I cannot play the movie using WinDVD 8.

Just wait till the REAL software comes out. Should be soon. Once that is out most kinks should be fixed.

I have a feeling even newer mid-higer end single core CPU’s will work. You can always OC>

Well, After many hours of screwing with this idea I have finally done it! I’m here to tell you all it is possible with the JP version of WinDVD8. I’m watching Dune in HD on my “super computer” without anything special except the X-Box HD DVD player! My next move is to get a video card with component outputs so I can jack this into my Epsom 10+ projector! $499 for a home player? @#$% that man! I hear ATI who just got bought by AMD has such a video card. I guess its time to put a PC under my coffee table for video. BTW my cpu is cruising comfortably at around %50 to do this.

dave, i gotta ask what spec your pc is at. i havent tried getting my hd-dvd drive to work on my pc as i’ve not looked up how to do it until now. And seeing as im currently at work cant do it for a good few hours.
i wouldn’t call my pc a “super computer”, but i built it myself and im very happy with it. It’s an AMD64 3500+, 3gb ram, and NVidia 7600 256mb graphics. Im ruuning all this through a Sony kdl26s2010, dvi to vga.

Official software is out!!! Path for WinDVD and official from PowerDVD.

Go to their sites and see!!! These helped resolve a bunch of issues.

Don’t buy the Kool-Aid yet! I just purchased and downloaded the supposedly HD DVD and BD supporting version of PowerDVD 7.0 Ultra and what I was downloaded was Version 7.2 BD Version. It purports to be able to play Blu-Ray discs but I don’t have a BD drive. I have the XBox 360 HD DVD Drive. I have a message into Cyberlink support to find out WTF. But for now I don’t recommend dropping the $99 unless you want the headache.

Got a very fast response from PowerDVD. You have to connect the HD-DVD drive and not have any Blu-Ray drives connected when installing PowerDVD and then it will load the HD DVD version. This didn’t get me to the point of playing HD-DVDs over the HDMI->DVI connection on my Sapphire X1600, which I have not successfully done, but it did get the correct version of PowerDVD Ultra installed.

I too am experiencing problems playing the xbox360 add on HD-DVD drive on the PC with the new PowerDVD Ultra v7.2. I am using the drivers which I downloaded from here. The HD-DVD itself is recognized in windows explorer. In this case it was the King Kong movie. But on PowerDVD it stated it was in “FILE mode” and would not play. I was able to explore the contents of the DVD.

If anyone was able to get the movie to play using the PowerDVD ultra, by all means, please share the steps required.

PowerDVD Ultra worked fine with me …

I got it working … kinda… King Kong has picture in picture stuck on and when you try to jump to a scene you get audio only and no video. So it sorta works :)

Anyone know how to solve these problems?

For all those people moaning that “I have an X next to 360 memory unit”, that is normal. Yes it shows up twice in device manager along with “Xbox Security Method 3″. The drive contains built-in flash memory for the 360 to save bookmarks, cookies and other HD-DVD related things to. The PC ignores this as it saves all this stuff into your C: drive. Its merely so people with a 360 and no memory card or hard drive can still use all the HD DVD features.

For those who moan that it shows up as a CD-ROM, perhaps you didnt install the UDF drivers properly. It should show up as as “DVD Drive” with no disk inserted. Either way, try putting a HD DVD in the drive and you will soon see if it works. If it works you will get the disk label show up and it will tell you the size of the disk. Otherwise, you will get nothing.

I can confirm PowerDVD 6.5 works although the in movie experience did not I just got a blank screen. Im about to test PowerDVD 7.2.
Remember: It ONLY works over analog, if you are using HDMI or DVI it will NOT play unless your monitor and graphics card support HDCP which is VERY unlikely. Its a known fact most graphics cards which CLAIM to support HDCP in fact do NOT! So do not even try if you are using DVI or HDMI, theres no point.

WinDVD I couldnt get to play at all.

I beg to differ — on the AVS forum there are a number of folks who have successfully played HD DVD movies off the Xbox 360 add-on drive with PowerDVD (6.5 or Ultra) out of their DVI or HDMI ports, but apparently not on an ATI Sapphire x1600 HDMI Pro, which seemed like the logical card choice. I think they are doing it with Nvidia cards, but the Nvidia cards are more expensive and apparently very loud. So I believe there is a cooperative effort going on at the AVS forum to get the Sapphire x1600 up and running over the digital outputs. One guy was able to get an AGP version to work over DVI, but at 720p, and this doesn’t help anyone with the PCIe version of the card.

I have not been successful with the digital output. But the movies look pretty good over the VGA output. Still, I want pure digital…

You can go to Windows Update and download the drivers for the “360 memory units”.

Using PowerDVD v7.1 Ultra I got HD-DVD movies to play flawlessly with my Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive and my pc. Here is my setup:

Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 Extreme @ 2.93 ghz
2 GB Ram
nVidia GeForce 7950 GX2 video card
22″ Samsung SyncMaster 225BW connected via DVI

I don’t think having those memory units active or with drivers is necessary for HD DVd playback, though. It just stops the “found new hardware” dialog from appearing after every boot, right?

Right.

But it proves MS knows people are using this drive on their PCs. By far the cheapest next gen DVD drive you can get for your computer and MS is taking huge $$$ losses just to get the drive out there in support of the HD-DVD format.

The only AACS-supported playback application is the OEM version of Intervideo WinDVD that’s bundled with Sony’s Blu-ray equipped VAIO notebook

Slaves to the system……grow up or evolve at best……………..

Has anyone gotten the XBox HD/ PowerDVD combo to work in WinXP with either of the following video cards over the DVI/HDMI digital port:

(1) Sapphire x1600 HDMI Pro PCIe version or

(2) MSI NX7600GT Diamond Plus GeForce 7600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 VIVO PCI Express

at 1080p? If so, what drivers?

by the looks of teh conector it is teh same as the connector on teh back of a slimline cd/dvd drive from a loptop etc! whan my drive arrives next week im going to try pluging my slimline cd drive to ide converter into it just to see what happens!?

I would love to be able to replace the drive in my 360 with the HD-Drive. It would be nice to not have to have 2 boxes. And also then I would be able to just stick a game in the 360 OR a HD-DVD in the 360. When someone figures that out I will be a happy man.

I belive that plug on the back of the drive is a standard ATAPI plug for slim DVD Players…
And all you need is this http://www.addonics.com/products/io/adsatapisa.asp to make it an internal drive…

I’ve got the HDCP NVIDIA based 7950, I’ve got a 50″ hdcp capable plasma. I’ve got my XBOX 360 HD-DVD however I’ve also got Vista 32Bit.. Are the the Vista Nvidia drivers HDCP compliant? Does the PowerDVD Ultra software work with Vista? Anyone had any luck with this?

Has anyone actually taken the 360 HD out and placed in a regular 5.25 bay? I really don’t want to fry my unit.

Th only downside is it might be noisier. This thing is very noisy.

Tyler,
If you were answering my post about internalizing the HD-Dvd player…Thats all good and stuff. But the 1 problem left is that the HD-Dvd player for the xbox wont play the 360 games. Which is the 1 thing left from making it work…

Windows XP does not recognize my HD-DVD Drive

Hello everyone,
Well, I got the XBOX 360 HD player work. Here is what I have.
I have a Dell XPS 400 Pentium D 3.2Ghz, 2GB memory, PNY 7950 GT card with HDCP support (there are many cheaper card out there with HDCP support)
Anyway, I plugged the XBOX in my Dell computer and Windows Xp Pro found the drivers with no problem and I didn’t see any unusual things in the hard ware profile. (Requires restart) I could see the content of the other DVDs and play them but not the HD. Then I downloaded the Cyber link’s PowerDVD ULTRA that will play both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD ($99 though). You can download the software from http://www.cyberlink.com.
Your HD DVD player must be attached to your computer before you install the PowerDVD otherwise it will install the BLU-Ray version. At first I thought they sent me the wrong version but apparently it plays both versions depending on which player is installed on your system. I am not sure how PowerDVD would act if you have both HD and Blu-Ray players.
Anyway, I attached the computer to my Dell 24″ monitor and the movie would come on but it would stop after few seconds giving me an error, however, when I attached it to my Panasonic 50″ plasma display, the movie started to play.
So I got a HD DVD HTPS now (without the look of the HTPC of course). Now I need to get a good sound card to play everything in digital sound. I think the original sound card from XPS 400 does not have SPDIF out.
The only problem I encountered was that it won’t play on non HDCP monitor.
Good luck

Here is what Cyberlink’s support told me about the PowerDVD installation issue.

“PowerDVD Ultra use Blu ray edition as default, if you installed HD-DVD and Blu Ray device at the same machine and if you want to play HD-DVD title with HD-DVD device, user has to be disconnect the Blu ray device and reinstall PowerDVD Ultra.

We will soon release a solution to this issue on our Cyberlink website. Please keep visit http://www.cyberlink.com for latest updates.”

I did see some mention of the King Kong HD-DVD, and I wanted to comment:

I found it interesting to watch how fake the backgrounds looked in some of the action scenes. They shouted “green screen” !!!

I know what HD can look like — Discovery HD has many good examples of shows in HD.

So, if HD-DVD (or blue-ray for that matter) brings to my screen this “phony” feeling, I’d almost settle for an up-converted standard DVD on some of those movies.

Comments?

Roger

So to have the 360 hd-dvd play true hd movies on your pc,you’ll need to have a video card that supports hdcp as well as a monitor that supports hdcp?

It’s important to note that 1080i is not 1080p when it comes to television sets – I think this is an area many people get confused. Early CRT HDTVs are not giving you a 1920×540 (1080i) resolution, nor is there any point to outputting a 1080i signal to your 1368×768 LCD HDTV.

I see a benefit to having 1080p movies only in that it provides some “future-proofing” for your Blu-Ray / HD-DVD movies (should you choose to adopt). The trend in televisions has been towards bigger, slimmer, better sets to enter the home – as prices continue to fall it’s nice to know that, should I replace my 26″ 720p set with a 37″ 1080p set in five years, the movie will still have the same “crispness”. The more detailed image of a 1080p picture will let it keep the same pixel density I’m used to with 720p when displayed on a larger screen.

I fail to understand the Sony vs Microsoft arguements here, however. The “system war” as you speak of it is no longer about hardware. Software (games) and online content are ultimately what will determine the winner of this generation. Frankly, both the Wii and the Xbox 360 have done more in this respect (with Xbox Live and WiiConnect24) than the PS3. With the 360 pushing to have movie rentals, tv show downloads, etc… it’s making advances in the direction consumers are going.

These arguements are almost as idiotic as the “LCD wars” I see in AVS forums. Who cares if a Sony LCD panel delivers a 10% better contrast level right now over a Syntax-Olevia, when in two years laser-driven projection sets will blow both panels out of the water? What’s the point of spending $1000 extra now for a few extra inches when a completely new screen will cost less in two years?

This article was cool in that it gave us hope of a $200 media drive, not much more than a DVD Recorder (aka rip-off) from Best Buy.

As far as the DRM Questions go – who knows when HDCP will begin to matter, frankly that’s going to be up to consumers. If you average consumer becomes aware enough to say “no, I won’t buy discs marked as requiring HDCP compliance” then it will go the way of Circuit City’s DIVX. As far as I’m concerned though, it’s almost a non-issue. All of the DirectX 10 graphics cards are going to support HDCP via their DVI ports, almost all HDTVs have HDMI ports, and widescreen computer monitors are starting to spout HDCP compliant DVI ports. If you’re honestly worried, make sure your next monitor is HDCP compliant (has HDCP-DVI or HDMI port) and you’ll be fine.

I think a lot of the knee jerk “I’m rich and uneducated, the PS3 will win, if you weren’t poor you’d think so too” debacle is amusing. Since when have the wealthiest determined what product becomes popular? McDonald’s doesn’t sell millions of grease-burgers by catering to the nation’s elite. The current trend in marketing is simply to make your product appear to be trendy, hip, sported by wealthy celebrities and social climbers – yet completely affordable to every Joe Citizen. The iPod is a perfect example – how many people, in all honesty, couldn’t save up $250 if they really wanted one?

In any case – my last comment on this system war – to ignore where price plays a part in this war is absolutely foolish. Microsoft has positioned themselves as a business so that they can reduce the cost of manufacturing on the 360 as quickly as possible. This leaves them free to cut the price on the system whenever they’re certain they’ve sold to everyone who will buy at the current price point. Nintendo is in the same boat with the Wii – yet Sony is tied to dozens of expensive manufacturers and will likely still be selling at a lose for the next two years. I’m not saying they’re going to lose this generation, but as a business I simply don’t envy their position.

Ultimately it will still come down to who puts out the best games though, not what HD-format their system supports, as the masses simply aren’t going to care when one has Halo or Final Fantasy and the other doesn’t.

microsoft own us.

turn us to microsoft slave.

first rule the pc system,
then mobile system,
then gaming system,
then mp3 & mp4 player
then rule our life,
and then rule the world.

All hail to master Bill & kingdom microsoft

muahahaha

all you base belong to us

Make sure your graphics card supports HDCP as mine doesnt and have wasted a lot of money on this drive and now its just an expensive paperweight

So has anybody been able to internalize it yet? TIA. I am about to drink the Kool Aid. Thank you
-Jared

Sony just lost the war.

Blu-Ray will not be licensed to the adult industry as per a sony spokesperson. This is the same thing they did with Betamax.

14 MAJOR adult studios have now announced HD-DVD support.

PORN drives the tech industry… like it or not.

Wonderfull stuff always happens at the CES-Adult expo and (what used to be) the comdex-AVN awards shows (gotta love computers and porn a block from each other)

can this make your video on your pc go faster or something cuz i cant play SPLINTER CELL:DOUBLE AGENT.my computer is hp with 1.0gb memory,250gb hard drive and 820 intel pentium d processor please reply on my e-mail (roller_board678@hotmail.com) I KNOW THE E-MAIL ADRESSE IS DORKY

Fact is the majority of the public do not know the technical jargen that goes on in these threads. Most of the public will have heard about HDTV’s and HD Ready, HD gaming….etc. Ok Blu-Ray is also fairly well known about, but no where near as much as the HDDVD format.

Im no fanboy, i buy which ever console i want at the time by the pros and cons that concern me. I look at the 360 and think hey, its a great system, offers everything i need including the power and games, and the price tag suits me just fine. It also gives me a choice to add on more features…should i need them.

Thats where Sony have gone wrong in my opinion. Forcing consumers into technology they simply dont need and jacking the price up was a bad move. Sure id like the 360 to have bluetooth and a standard HDDVD built in but i dont actually need it. To me the HD gaming is far more important than HD movies. i get tired of a crystal clear picture on my HD TV pretty quick. HD gaming is something else to me. Thats why i bought my 360 because as far as gaming goes the 360 is a year ahead on games, and overall the graphical differences are going to me pretty small. As long as good games come out for the 360 i’ll be happy.

Untill ALL DVD players and formats become High Definition, then im not bothered about it for movie purposes. I’ll wait till it becomes the norm and prices come down in a few years.

Oh and HEATH’s comment about Blu-Ray/Sony losing the so called war……i agree having just heard about the 14 major adult studios going with HDDVD. Porn could run the world lol

btw, i meant i get tired of watching HD television quite quickly. the wow factor goes after a while. HD gaming makes me smile every time i play

personally i belive in hd dvd over blueray. but right now i dont care. i want to play games! having psone, ps2, and a 360, well, the 360 is junk. i love the games i have for it, but my first one died after a week, six months later my second is dea. why? ive been reading somany posts this weekend since it died about the same thing happening to all over to way too many people. something is not right with the hardware and/or the updates. my n64 still works, and never had a problem with any playstations i had. for reasons i wont get into i switched to xbox. mistake. as soon has my third 360 get back from “repair” im taking it along with the hddvd drive and trading it in for more reliable hardware. i dont care what format the games are on. as long as they play great and look good. i just want to play games and expect the console to outlast me not the other way around! if microsoft doesnt fix these issues, they will end up losing what they built for over a year including thier customers.

I have vista ultimate release already installed. (I get MSDN so it is legit.) Amazingly enough it deteced the drive, installed drivers, but it still shows as a Toshiba DVD drive. Looking through the device manager I cant seem to locate anything that refers to it as an Xbox 360. Although it did seem to install drivers with that name.

Have I played any movies? No. DO I own a HDCP tv? No. DO I care? No. My monitors ar DVI but not sure thats good enough. Oh well not that I care. It’s still fun to say I got one., I thouhgt it was just fun to buy to see what it could do.

Ciao

Actually HVD is already out in the Corporate world. The sizes range from 200GB to 1TB. The really cool thing is HD technology, they are finalizing TV’s that can display 7,680×4,320 which is 16 times 1080p. Of course not one person on this page will own one for a few years. They have actually got a 3-D setup at this resolution to.

I need it!

for sale xbox 360 premium system games

for sale xbox 360 premium system,

2 official wireless pads
20gb hard drive
headset
component hd av cable

proof of recipt, comes with original box, excellent condition, hardly any use

call of duty 3
tom clancy’s splinter cell double agent
fifa 2007
battlefield 2
oblivion
project gotham racing 3
tomb raider legend

$300

email me for any questions

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Wow so y ou need an hdcp monitor for this to work? i was hoping it would play on my regular lcd…

i havea 7900gs in mirror mode connected to my lcd tv via component

k well i did everything right now and can explore drive etc..

now im running into the damn hdcp issue…this sucks… can this be cracked?

forget it..

finally got it to work…..

wont displan on my 19in lcd but will disply on my 1080i lcd tv via component… doesnt looks as good as the 360 but atleast it works..

image definitely looks better with windvd then powerdvd

Re: Mac OS X playback (10.4.8):

In DVD Player, go to File – OPEN DVD MEDIA. From there, browse to an HVDVD_TS folder.

My guess is that the disc which Geeky used was encoded in VC1.

Please, somebody out there test a disc encoded in MPEG2 or MPEG4/AVC.

JAY: You’re mistaken; HD DVD-Rs created in DVD Studio Pro 4 will play back on any Mac with Tiger and at least a G5 or Intel processor.

Can you post a picture of the front bezel of the toshiba drive?
Is it possible to mount it into a normal pc case?

I wonder since Vista detects it, if now XP doesn’t need these drivers? Also, still no Linux drivers? Also some of the combo legal issues have been worked out. LG is releasing a combo drive (not enough features to make it worth yet in my opinion) (I need to buy a dvd burner still but I only move up to BD and HD-DVD on my computer when it burns dual-layer of both and dvd+-rw and cd-rw as I said eariler 360 player yes ps3 yes other than that wait) (I love how dvd players are becoming more and more recorders as the standard) and they are working on a dual sided disc.

The dual sided disc is called Total HD and is being produced by Warner Brothers.

i plugged in the hd dvd drive into my PC with power, but windows does not even detect a device. I don’t understand why this is happening, its not my USB ports either, they’re all live, windows just is not recognizing it. Is it because the drive sits idle, is there some way to have it always powered on?

I bought one, and started hacking it. It is too wide initially to mount internally, mainly because it has these plastic mounting brackets on either side. I broke out my trusty Dremel and took them off. The next hurdle was that it is too narrow by about 3/8″ without the plastic tabs and the metal brackets. Also, it doesn’t have the mounting screw holes on the sides, so that is another issue. Another thing is it has these metal breakouts on the back of the drive that pop out about 1/4″ to allow the mounting of the controller card to the unit. I had to dremel them off to allow the atapi to ide adapter to fit. Yet another thing, it doesn’t have an eject button on the front, so it needs to be ejected from the software. I think I am going to put it back into the external drive casing and see if it still works. If not, I am going to exchange it for another….

Want to share my experience – the drive works beautifully on my XP box and plays HD DVDs.

What I did was:
1) Purchased PowerDVD 7.2 deluxe
2) Purchased Xbox 360 HD DVD drive
3) Downloaded drivers for XP (the device is recognized as Toshiba DVD drive)
5) Put King Kong HD DVD in the drive (come with the drive)

That’s it. It started to play. the picture quality is outstanding even compared to HD cable.

It plays through my Sharp Z2000 and My CRT monitor without any problems.

Heed to have a fairly fast PC – mine is AMD 64 X2 3800+, 1 GB, 7600 GT video. It used about 80% of the CPU while playing, so any slower PC would produce a jerky picture.

Best of luck to you all. HD DVD rules!

PS. Step 6. Switched my Netflix to HD DVDs!!!

Wired mag (feb 07, pg 60) says that the HD DVD drive can be “hacked” to work directly with a TV. Is this true? I have a Samsung HD CRT which has a USB plug in back, and an Optoma HR-77 projector which HDMI and component inputs. Is there a way to use it with these WITHOUT a PC in the middle?

Nick,

Got a few questions for you.

Thanks for sharing!

PDVD Deluxe has funny comparison stats on the Cyberlink website when comparing versions of PDVD. It states they play a number of HD content types, but not HD DVD’s. Interesting you got deluxe to work. Have you any way of knowing if the disks you played are H.264, MPEG 2, MPEG 4 or even VC-1? I have know idea how you’d learn that. Just currious what Deluxe can’t play and why Cyberlink is saying it won’t play HD-DVD when it lists formats that are clearly used to encode HDDVD.

Also, could you please let us know:

1. Your graphics card
2. The type connection you used from your card to the Z2000 (HDMI, DVI, VGA, etc.)
3. The type of connection made to your CRT.
4. To your knowledge, is your graphics card, Z2000 and CRT (doubtful) HDCP compliant?

Thanks!!

He already told you his graphics cant you read?

“Heed to have a fairly fast PC – mine is AMD 64 X2 3800+, 1 GB, *******7600 GT video*****. It used about 80% of the CPU while playing, so any slower PC would produce a jerky picture.”
That is a pretty slow card so if it can run HD dvd and yours is a 7900 you should be fine.

Also only digital connection is HDCP enabled analouge such as component/VGA arnt but for some reason it will still allow playback which is good.
CRT connection is almosrt always VGA somtimes DVI.

You need to research encoding, the type of encoding is on the disk if you explore it and i think powerDVD playes all of them including BD.

Im using powerdvd 7.1 Hd dvd and i can almost playback dvd’s but i need a new monitor which im hopefuly gettin in the next few days.

Ok no need for new monitor just get this software anydvd hd (edition)
http://sandbox.slysoft.com/beta/SetupAnyDVDhd6121.exe
http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=1375

follow this; or what bits you need to

1) Purchase PowerDVD 7.2 deluxe
2) Purchase Xbox 360 HD DVD drive
3) Downloaded drivers for XP (the device is recognized as Toshiba DVD drive) use windows update. install anydvd and run it keep it open. then open cyberlink!
4) Put King Kong HD DVD in the drive (come with the drive)

Should start playing with HDCP hardware!!! saves me alot of money.
enjoy¬!

I did some testing with Superman returns and only powerdvd 7.2, and used about 75% of the CPU. Next i tried it with nvidia pure video installed, and powerdvd for playback and got it down to 50%. apparently you need the nvidia codec for hardware decodeing.

My system is a AMD x2 3800+, 2GB and a 7800GT. The core on the 7800GT only run at a speed of 400MHz, So it is slow to decode, you should do better with a 7600GT (560MHz), or a 7300GS (550MHz).

Does anyone have a Geforce 8800GTX running with the 360 HD drive? Which drivers do I need for playback? What is the nvidia pure video codec?

yes i do use the latest drivers and enable nvidiapurevideo in the menu. Im not sure but it works at least

I can see on nvidia’s homepage that from driver version 93.71, they support purevidio. Apparently you dont have to install it or buy it. dang waste of money.

I’m now using my Geforce 8800GTX with a Dell 2407WFP and the Xbox 360 HD-Drive, but when I’m playing a HD-DVD with PowerDVD 7.1 Ultra, there’s a green colour fault.
What can I do?

Regards

Dose anyone know if you can hook the XBOX 360 hd Dvd Drive into a ps3 so you can play hd dvd movies onto that

Master;
ive got same hardware as you. have you looked at which revisoin of the monitor you have A04 is latest i belive. Although i still have banding problems in certian places. Which OS are you using powerdvd wont wont with vista X64 for me i get a black screen. havent tried XP since i got the screen.

Just wanted to say thanks for whomever wrote the article. I never even thought to try to do this. I’m sure its already been mentioned but Vista found all the drivers for me and I didn’t have to do any extra work to get the player to work. Anyways, I am going to subscribe to this blog. Keep up the awesome work!

I’ve installed the 360 hddvd drive on my computer running cyberlinks power dvd 6.5v
It plays for 3 secs nd then tells me that the content is protected and the system is unable to play it.. any idea how i can overcome this problem..
Thanks
Tony

Never mind I hooked up my lcd using VGA cord instead of DVI and solved the issue.
but now theres another problem… I have 4 hddvd movies and 1 of them plays the intro and then stops.. the other 3 play no problem. I played the same movie on a actual Toshiba HD DVD AX-1 Player and it works fine.. very puzzling anyone???

ok, so ive got the drive installed on win xp pro system, but it wont read the king kong disk, says its not in the drive. reads/plays standard dvd’s fine. dell 24″ hdcp monitor, core 2 duo, got purevideo installed, nvidia 93.71 driver, only thing is my 7900gs isnt hdcp. that shouldnt stop it from reading the disk, just playing it right? another other suggestions?

Thanks all for info.

Any conparsion of systems what work or not?

My experience:

The xbox drive work okay with usb on any Xp system with drivers, data can be read.

I havent yet tried with atapi connector, I have it too.

PoverDVD ultra works with HDCP, but not without it, no analog out put with such cards, why?

On dell M90 it doesn’t work since Nvidia have no proper driver for this chipset, not even newest drivers.

I tested to run from hard disk without HDCP card , no success, PowerDVD shows error.

Should I choose another player?

Mike

For all here who think 1080P is a big selling point, all I can say is go look at the HD threads on the AVS or After Dawn forums and you will learn why at this point its pretty much useless and will mort likely be that way for a long time to come.

Its also inferior to 720P when it comes to movies.. Dont believe me ?

Go read and learn why

I have to say that Fanboys are probably the most ignorant people on the face of the planet and it usually shows : )

MIKE/pigliiit : you need all HDCP hardware otherwise powerdvd wont play. You can use anyDVD HD to remove the protection system see my post above

And apparntley theres no point taking it apart as its more complicated than it looks as it needs external power etc, + it doesnt have standard drive mountings i hear drilling new ones would be risky.

Candy your probabley right.

1080p_is_overhyped- sorry m8 your wrong (as are quite a few people in this thread) full hd (1080p, the P means progressive scan) requires a HDMI port/cable to carry/send the signal. the current 360 port cannot do this so theyre magic update is meaningless. also the update (i just looked) doesnt give 360 full 1080p capabilitly at all and basically is a plug-in (if you will) to UPSCALE the 1080i signal (HENSE “FAKE 1080 in previous comment). tbh both i and p are very similar and i cant actually tell the difference at all (watching assassin’s creed trailers anyway :P). im not gonna stick up for sum1 on the net cuz that has to be the geekyest thing ever but i do agree 100% with jumpmancerros23 and the guy is on my wavelength (dude add me! reece198921@hotmail.com) im not as “punctual” as some of you here but i dont give a shit! – if you cant understand my typing then at least you have nothing to complain about. i get my ps3 2morro at midnight (not happy at all, that my bed time) and hopefully 360 will just slowly dissappear off the sleves (and am i the only person on the planet to notice theyre cream and not fucking white? :S)

im not a fanboy, i just know sony has made me sum gr8 consoles so ill buy the next one…its not like im gonna put my knob in the slot-loader :S ps3 heaven? u freak!

thanks for the black screen tip. and ive tried a m8′s hd dvd player..as far as i can tell this thread is a lame hoax. the only reason i looked was because i thought the possability od HD-DVD on PS3 is just plain funny.. :)

*theres no chance ill look back here as my ps3 shoud keep me pre-occupied till the end of time, so just add me if u have summit to say*

-dan (www.myspace.com/daniel_reece)

learn how to speak english you fucking redneck dumbass!!!

and who gives a fuck that you’re getting a ps3, i hope it blows up in your hillbilly face.

now go fuck your mamma some more.

Wow… Finally the Elite version of the 360 will be released late april…
I cannot wait to try out my drive with HDMI 1080P!!! My sweet new 60″ XBR2 should display everything pretty nicely in FULL HD!

has any software come out that that will officaly play hd dvds?

has any offical software come out yet that will play hd dvds? Thanks

I am running ati raedon x1950 pro as my video card for the xbox hd dvd player, but in terms of audio out, through optical, whats a good sound card asuming ive got a high end reciever? Thanks

Seems like a lot of people are saying they bought “paperweights” when they bought the X-Box add-on without a HDCP compliant monitor/video card… But can’t you just use the drive and BackupHDDVD to rip the contents of the disc to your harddisk and play the movie from the hard disk to a non-HDCP monitor (since BackupHDDVD removes the AACS protection, and so the HDCP protection as well)?

JumpManceros23 or whatever your name is and all those who are rising to this tittle tattle of “my opinion is better than yours” – Grow up and stop being so insecure, please. This forum was an opportunity for those who are interested in hacking the 360 HD DVDdrive not to squabble. Christ – I’m sure the very informative writers are shaking their beads in dissappointment and wondering why they bothered.
I personally have enjoyed reading the first third of the psts and responses from the more intelligent readers and would suggest you guys hand over phone numbers to argue in your own time or perhaps arrange some fisticuffs or perhaps a duel to the death over something so vital to the species – your species ……I’ll help you with this one thing – I’m laughing at you children because I’m just waiting for roast lamb at my mothers on easter which will be really nice and will know that you are going to post loads of replies that noone is going to read because they stopped reading this forum when you guys ruied it. But my lamb will taste jolly good and you wasted 2 minutes reading this. Which surprises me – I’m astounded you can read, write or opperate microtechnology and feel that education might have been better afforded and appreciated by others good bye.
PS xbox 360 IS best.

I need help. Is there anyway to break the region coding on the hd dvd drive. I bought a us one which is fine.But after watching a few uk films first on it because nothing was out in the states it has locked like my old pc dvd player i.e six tries and your locked out. I now have 600 us films and no player can anyone help.

cheers

MCRSOOTIE

ps3 funny. bly ray discs can only be used a number of times before they are useless. no protection. hahahah funny for the product of the future. If any one does invest in the over priced two game console make sueyou have a good back-up electricty supply because if you do not shut the machine down fromthe front button then it is bust “source computer and video games magazine” they turned the machine of from the rear and it would not work again so beware the power cut my friends.

laters.

p.s. if you want to play my gamer tag is as above.

live rocks

I got this working recently, but had to buy CyberLink DVD Ultra for $99 to get things working as the shareware version of WinDVD 8 was not working at all.. I have to say, the image quality is breaktaking. I am running over USB to my PC which is a 3.2ghz core2duo with 8800GTX graphics cards, 2gb memory, and a Westinghouse LVM-37w3 (over DVI –to–> DVI to DVI2 port on the Westy, which is the HDCP compliant port).. I was amazed how well this worked and am very happy with it. the image quality up close it just stunning.. but I do have a fairly powerful machine running this also, so ymmv depending on hardware used. but one thing is for sure, the USB 2.0 connection seems to be enough BW for this to work just fine. The CyberLink DVD Ultra software is a little pricy, but it works flawlessly.. and if you consider the total of about $300 invested, it still is the cheapest way to get HD DVD playback capability..

have any1 better pictures (INSIDE THE CASE ) from the HD DVD Drive from xbox i need help! Got a Broken HD DVD From EBAY driv is okay!

the CASE was broken , and the cables inside the case ( for USB ) a missing i need pictures inside the case to Build my own cable.

the pictures form here a to small i cant see all cables !

PLS ANY 1

acidsound@gmx.net

thx in advance!

Revenant,

after you have tested all nice stuff, the TV you use is only aviable in your country?

I will be soon in Chicago and gould pick up something if it’s worth to do so.

I purchased a LG 24 inch computer screen with HDMI, I will test it with my equipment and wiht the brand new BLUray player I bought in Hong Kong (PSP3). The player was 50% cheaper there than in Finland. Most stuff I pickup on businees trips.

I will cover more when I tested all.

Just got the Xbox drive mounted internally in my PC. It was fun

http://achernob.blogspot.com/2007/04/mounting-xbbox-360-hd-drive-into-my-pc.html

Hey anyone know another location for those drivers. The link does not work anymore.

just wondering if anyone can help me with a question:

would the xbox 360 hd dvd drive work with a laptop? from what i can tell, vista recognises the drive no problems, so im sure that the drive will install correctly. i have a geforce go7400, which doesnt support hdcp (as far as im aware, no laptop cards do). but, if im planning to watch hd content on my laptop, will the hdcp come into play, as i dont think a laptop display uses DVI. 1080P is not an issue for me, as my monitor doesnt support that res.

would performance take a hit? i have a core duo 1.67ghz, 2gb ram, 256mb ram geforce go7400.

thanks. love how microsoft built support for the drive into vista. they must really be into their idea of converging the pc and xbox together

Slysoft have recently produced AnyDVD-HD which allows you to watch HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies at full res on non HDCP compliant equipment. Also a new version of CyberLink Power DVD Ultra (v7.3) will play both HD and Blu-Ray movies. Neither are cheap but it works and it works very well indeed.

dabm

I tested XBOX 360 drive with USB 2.0 connection to DELL M90, the drive works and PowerDVD works fine alone,

BUT without AnyDVD no success, Nvidia driver doesn’t work for this machine, since newest for this QuadroFX isn’t compactible.

Downlod BDadvisor from Cyberlinks homepage.

Don’t try Nero, since it will not allow any playback if min.req. are achieved.

Quite nice jungle for new tech?

MIKE

I personally think that microsoft have their hands in too many pies (so to speak)

give me an Apple Mac and a PS3 any day thank you!

ANT
I was hoping you meant it wouold work without. Your summary did say:
“Should start playing with HDCP hardware!!! “

I am trying to run my 360 add-on with a GeForce 6600GTX and a 2.6GHz P4HT with XP SP2 installed. My vid card is not HDCP, but my monitor may be (Samsung 930B). Either way, I am using anydvd which is supposed to get around the HDCP protection, and I have PowerDVD 7.3 Deluxe–my monitor is running through DVI->DVI.

The HDDVD starts to play, but after 2 or 3 seconds the app (PowerDVD) crashes. I can see the menu start to come up, but then it crashes. Anyone know if this is because my hardware is not powerful enough? I am trying to figure out the problem.

-tom

Toys R Us in Canada has the Xbox 360 HD-DVD on sale for $159.99. On sale until May 8

I also read a Message from another forum: that Nero 7 with the Blu Ray/ HD-DVD Plugin is working. You might need AnyDVD to watch at full 1080p resolution

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16874103051

I just bought one to see if it works

Just picked up a Slim cd-rom to IDE adapter from halted.com. This should work perfect for the conversion to my pc. It has the floppy power connector for power, for only $5.95

Thanks for the tip Tim, picked up 360 HD DVD at Toys R us in Calgary for $159.
Connected it to my Windows Vista Ultimate x64 using Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra.
No problem. This rocks!

Question for Canuck or any one who can help

I haven’t been able to watch any movies yet, I was wondering if you could describe what you did and what applications and drivers you used. My problem is that I am using Windows XP prof. and although the operating system recognizes the drive, I can not see the directories or files in windows explorer. I have been able to rip the files off the drive using AnyDVDHD but not view the files directly. My other problem is that I purchased Nero Ultra Edition with the blu-ray/HD-DVD plugin and this software does not even recognize the files on the Xbox drive or ripped files on the hard drive.

Thanks.

Microsoft HD DVD Player Xbox 360
Can i use the HD DVD 360 Player without having a xbox 360?

Hi Patttttttty

Some people have had good luck in using the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive to play movies on their PC’s. For me I have been successful in connecting the drive to my computer and being able to see and rip the files to the hard drive on an Windows XP prof. Get the driver from the link at the beginning to allow you to read the UDF directory information. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen one movie yet because the player software i purchased did not work as advertized. The software I purchased was Nero 7 Ultra edition enhanced. Don’t even consider this software because they have terrible product support. Also don’t even consider doing this if you don’t have one of the latest and fastest computers on the market. Both in Processing and in Video capabilities. You can download a utility from Nero and Cyberlink to test your computer is capable of playing HD content.. It looks like Cyberlink Power DVD Ultra is the only solution so far. Good luck

I got the xbox 360 hd dvd drive to work using power dvd with no problems but now my pc will not boot with it plugged in i am using vista 32 bit ulita any answers?

…Common, guys: All you need to do is a clean installation starting from the system, because when the register gets dirty with all the installing, de-installing, installing… it has entries that make everything to malfunction.

I’ve used it with my Xbox 360 and works like silk, BUT, after all your posts mentioning that with very well hardwared PCs you were unable to make the 360 HD-DVD work correctly, I put myself the little homework to try something with an old Media Center I have -well, not sooo old, but compared with your hardware this is a blender or a toaster:
It has a Pentium D 915 2.8Ghz, only 1Gb DDR2, a RAID of 240Gb, Creative Audigy and the Nvidia 7300GS (one of the slowest and cheapest ones!)…… So I installed the system, then new drivers and immediately connected the 360 HD-DVD reader, I left the system to install the drivers by itself. After that, I installed AnyDVD HD 6.1.4.3, and PowerDVD Ultra 7.3 y tadaaaaaaaaaa, everything was displaying perfectly on the 42” LCD Viewsonic Screen that I have on my living room.

I guess you MUST have a better experience with this hardware!

I got this working fine last night.

For those of you without a HDCP compliant card or LCD, just download\buy Slysoft’s AnyDVD HD. It decrypts the HD-DVD key so you don’t need HDCP equipment over HDMI.

I’m using:
XP SP2
Core 2 6700
ATI X1900XTX (non-HDCP)
Aquos 46″ LCD
PowerDVD 7.3

I didn’t install the “hack” driver because I don’t need to see data, just play movies.

It works great :)

you can open a HD movie with the 360 HD-drive connected to the Mac os x , the Mac DVD Player can do that.. in prefrences you can configure the High defenition options to be able to view HD content

It is cool that someone was able to get this device to
work on a PC. Personally, though, I can’t see the why Microsoft would
release a device to play HD-DVD’s. There are very few around and there
is a competing format that might win the formate war.

Hello,

What do I need to plug the toshiba SD-S802A drive to my computer ?

thanks

IF YOU HAVE A FULLY UPDATED VERSION OF WINDOWS, THEN THE XBOX 360 HD DVD PLAYER SHOULD WORK AFTER YOU USE THE DRIVER FILE, JUST CLICK ON UPDATE FROM WINDOWS AND THE MEMORY UNITS WILL BE RECOGNIZED. BUT FOR SOME REASON ON WINDVD 8 I ONLY GET AUDIO, AND POWER DVD 6.5 HD GIVES ME VIDEO BUT NO AUDIO.

I figured out a way to play HD DVD “Red Dragon” my favorite movie to date. I have installed Windows XP SP2 and fully updated it. Then you need to install your XBOX 360 HD DVD drivers provided by Blueprint. Second reboot your PC and plug in your HD DVD addon. When plugged in you will get the message about your hardware, and then it will ask you to search for the drivers for the “XBOX 360 USB Memory Unit” using Windows Update will install the drivers needed, and since you installed the UDF 2.5 driver into you computer the device manager will tell you to reboot.

Steps:

1) Get a copy of PowerDVD 6.5 HD

2) AnyDVD HD

3) A coffee.

Use AnyDVD HD to copy YOUR MOVIE THAT YOU OWN to your HDD, I use C:\”Name” . Then once all that is said and done you can play it with Cyberlink’s PowerDVD 6.5 HD. Here are my specs:

Asrock Conroe945-DVI
Intel Core2Duo 1.86Ghz 2MB Cache
2GB 667Mhz DDR2
80GB ATA HDD
HD DVD Addon
Onboard Intel GMA 950 128MB Fixed via BIOS

Here is the trick you need to disable any services like antivirus, and the internet connection so that you don’t get hit while enjoying your movie. And then open the task manager and you will see “PDVDSrvc.exe” enable its system resources to “realtime” and then using the latest Intel GMA drivers look for “igfxsrvc.exe” and enable the system use to “high” . My Asrock motherboard came with a DVI adapter I used a DVI to HDMI cable and played “Red Dragon” from the HDD and it went all smooth. Very beautiful video, and sound. Thats How I did it. I don’t use AnyDVD to play the movie with PowerDVD 6.5 HD because the program cannot keep up with the software to play HD DVD.

Hello,

I plugged the drive to my computer using a slim ide adapter and when I eject the drive opens but if I insert a DVD and I close the drive nothing much happen… the DVD should turn but nothing. Windows see the driver but I can’t read anything… by the way I well installed the driver file

help me please ! thankss !!!

sorry for my english .. I’m french

To do this hack and mount internal you have to have a mini ATA to IDE adapter. Anybody know where to get one of these?

I have this kind of adapter : http://cgi.ebay.fr/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ih=019&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWN%3AIT&viewitem=&item=290123723125&rd=1&rd=1

and it doesn’t work. I can eject the drive and insert a DVD but after that nothing happen. The DVD doesn’t turn into the player. Windows see the player

You need Power DVD Ultra or Nero 7 ultra and then get the hd-dvd plugin for 25 bucks.. Not sure if the plugin comes with nero 7 ultra or not. I do know power dvd ultra plays hd-dvd and blu-ray. Microsoft did this on purpose. Which is why you can find a driver for it.

HEy im trying to hook up my xbox HD dvd player to my windows based pc, but in the process they tell u to go to rapid share and do some bs can someone explain me the prcess..please

I’m just thinking if there is any way to connect this Xbox 360 HD DVD player to PS3.

I subscribed to your feed with my favorite feed reader (igoogle)

I tried to connect the drive using the JAE 50 – IDE converter. I think the problem is that when you just connect this drive to the PC power supply it kills the drive… I have a feeling it needs a 3.3V source and not a 12V / 5V source, and that is why we are seeing people lose drives. NEC has an internal HD-DVD drive for around $220… its a lot better to just go and buy that then to buy a 360 drive, break it, and then give up and go buy the NEC :)

LG and TOSHIBA are coming out with combo HD-DVD and Blu Ray drives, however so far I have read quite a few negative things about these drives, and they do not support a lot of interactive features of the formats.

What model is the NEC HD-DVD you mentioned for $220?

The Xbox 360 will play the Blu-Ray disks created with Pinnacle Studio Pro 11. I was surprised, but it doesn’t play the Blu-Ray movies from Blockbuster. The quality is great, and the throughput is head and shoulders above the regular DVD players which will only attempt to play the Blu-Ray home movies

David

I just got Xbox 360 HD DVD for my computer , , I have XP media center and Windvd platium , the windows XP install the driver no problem . But The xbox360 Drive can only play the standard dvd not HD dvd , Why ? I need help . THANKS !

my vaio comes with WinDVD BD for blu-ray discs. can i use this to play back HD dvds with my xbox 360 hd dvd drive connected to my pc?

Hello,

Do you think it is possible to play Blu Ray DVDs on 360 HD DVD player connected to a computer ?

From what I know HD DVD and BLU RAY are very similar. Since most of the processing is done by my CPU and Video Card GPU, I think there may be a possibility to play BLU RAY titles using XBOX HD DVD player and special software.

Please let me know what you think about it.

Thanks

Greg,
Blu Ray and HD DVD are similar as far as codec specifications, but that’s where it ends. The physical media is really not that similar and a standard HD-DVD drive will not read a Blu Ray. There are some manufacturers who have worked on creating multi format players, but it requires alot of work because it takes multiple lasers in the same drive (different laser for different format).

-Jeremy

the new version of dvd player, 6.5.0 i think it is can play an hd-dvd on a mac. it just has to be the most updated version

I’ve read with great interest the articals about using the xbox 360 HD_DVD drive to play HD movies, In the UK Blockbusters where I live only seem to stock BD, but we have a Xbox so HD it is.

I managed to get get/download the toshiba HD driver, the PowerDvd 6.5, and even WinDvd for good measure, try as I may nothing seemed to be showing up on screen, I was begining to think my system was @ fault, no sound and deffinately no picture, all I got from powerDvd was green pixilated screen when paused, but @ least I could read the disk files in explorer.

I then happened to stumble across a prog called Slysoft AnyDVD & AnyDVD HD 6.1.7.5.
“BINGO” even on my mid to low spec machine (Athalon 2.4ghz, 2 gig ram, 533 bus, GF7300 Graphics card) im getting staggeringly sharp colourfull pictures on an analouge display running @ 1800×1440.

There is one thing however…… I cant get any sound to play can somebody help me..!!

P.S. I’m in the UK not the US. !

Rikki

hello
I just managed to connect drive using mini atapi to ide converter (with small modification)
and its working ! :) , the problem is missing 12 volt.
after I put 12 volt on two pins of the mini atapi its alive.
in the top row of the connector first two pins = 12 V , next two =5 V and next three = ground
originally pin 1 was free and second was connected to 5 V , all you need to do is to break that connection and put 12 V on pin 1 and 2
I hope that will help :)

Hi there!

@ Twotonerikki

The PowerDvd 6.5 is known to have problems with HD DVD playback and may cause problems as YOU mentioned.. My advice is to download / buy the latest version of PowerDvd and try again.. I have the 7.3 version and everything works just fine!

Hope this helps you out…

/ The Answer Guy

Hi there
@The Answer Guy,

Perfuse apologies for not getting back to you earlier,
I’ve been offline for a few days, Thankyou for the info. I’m on it right now. !!

Thx a million.

Twotonerikki. :-)

I have just bought one these, got it working with my Vista PC.
Two questions thou
1) Is it safe to remove the fan from the drive, the noise is really annoying when watching movies. I cant imagine the drive gets that hot, plus the PSU is outside the casing.

2) Is it possible to get the xbox media remote to work directly with Vista (I already have the Windows media remote and keyboard for my pc, and would like to use the Xbox remote as second remote)

Hi all,
Just got the xbox hd dvd drive recently and everything works fine, i’m using amd x2 4200 1gb ram, 6600gt vidcard. xp pro, powerdvd 7.3, anydvd hd.
I would recommend anyone thinking about getting the drive and don’t have vidcard with purevideo support, make sure you have a dual core cpu, it helps a lot, no stuttering whatsoever, i had to change my cpu from singlecore 2ghz cuz i would get some stuttering every now and then, now my cpu load barely gets above 50% during playback.
Kinda sucks that you can’t access the disc menu with the mouse in powerdvd, guess i’ll have to use my keyboard. Also, if you install anydvd hd, be warned that you won’t be able to watch netflix instantviewing anymore, wmplayer drm gets screwed up.

being the owner of both Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, I have the following pro’s / con’s

Xbox 360
Pro’s Wider gaming experience, cheaper console hardware, ability to use HD-DVD on standard PC’s. More advanced software / developer and user communities.

Con’s
Sounds like a Hurricane in your back room, External power supply, External HD DVD.
Small HD (Excepting the new Ultimate edition). Additional Cost for Wireless system

PS3
Pro’s
Single Hardware unit covering all requirements, HD, Power etc
Supposedly more advanced graphics processing, not yet proven in the field.
Ability to tie in your PSP, Play PS1 and PS2 games (on the higher level versions)
Ability to donate your processing time to folding@home distributed computing
Does not sound like a Hurriance in your back room
Larger Hard Drive (Excepting the new 360 Ultimate edition)
Ability to install any 2.5″ hard drive into the system, user upgradeable.
Built in Wireless and Bluetooth.

Con’s
Far more expensive than the other consoles on the market, not as good a performer when linked into Windows Media Centre.
Currently not as well supported on the game front and missing several key players in the movie industry due to not supporting HD DVD.

Hmmm.

Apples and Oranges I believe.

There is no direct comparison system v system, they are sold to completely different demographics, although Sony seem to be wishing to enter the mainstream market now with the revised console, Microsoft also seem to be re-evaluating their position by the release of new models with larger disk space.

Maybe they will reach a mediun line somewhere, but until then, you probably wouldn’t want to buy one or the other. Buy both :D

Keep Capitalism strong, even if only for imports from China. LOL

TTFN

Zuru

OK, I go the xbox360 drive like the rest of you, and powerdvd ultra. I have an ATI 1650 that provides dual link DVI to a 30′ HP monitor, the LP3065. Both card and monitor are SUPPOSED to support HDCP but PowerDVD is returning a “failure to enable HDCP” message. There diagnostic says the video connection is nonHDCP.

So, has anyone gotten HD-DVDs to play over any dual-link DVI connectors, like with the HP 30″ monitor or perhaps Dell’s, which is similar? I can only guess that HP has falsely advertised the HDCP compliance of their monitor, unless I need some sort of special dual-link cable to initiate it.

hey just had a question i have a 50inch plazma and just got a new HP computer with NVIDIA Geforce 8400 Gs graphics card and runs on windows vista with a intel core 2 quad processor … was thinking of geting an HD DVD player and was wondering if its worth geting the xbox hd dvd player and connnecting it to my comp and geting a wire to go from the comp to the tv ??

I successfully got the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive working on my PC yesterday.

I upgraded my PC from XP Mulitmedia to Windows VISTA Home Premium and also installed Cyberlink Power DVD Ultra, and added an ATI HD 2400 Pro video card.

When I plugged in the box to my PC it automatically downloaded and installed all the necessary drivers and I successfully played HD-DVD’s on my monitor (Sony 60″ SXRD)connected via DVI.

I was limited to using 720p resolution for display as that was all that the HD2400 pro seemed to be able to cope without causing the picture judder.

ET

All of this talk about Blu Ray being better than HD DVD. By specs, it might be. But all of you have to remember, like someone posted on here before, most people that will be watching HD DVD’s or Blu Ray will not be able to visually see the difference.
Now, before I get 28 posts stating the difference between the 2 formats, I already know the specs. Again, on paper, I understand. The specs speak for themselves.

The reality is that most people will be watching movies on an LCD, Plasma or DLP and as long as the movies look the same quality as their HD content they are used to seeing on Sundays when watching football, then they will be happy.

Again, I understand that there is technically a difference. But the majority of people across the world, will not be able to see this difference.

I have watched movies in HD DVD and Blu Ray and both look good.

So us arguing on here about which one is better and which one will win or lose is like competing in the special olympics, even if you win, you are still retarded….lol.

As someone else posted, Sony has tried some proprietary things and they have failed. But they also have been involved in some things like CD technology and others that have made it across the universe successfully.

I applaud both companies of Sony and Microsoft for being the leaders in this High Definition realm.
I appreciate the ability to watch movies in the comfort of my own home in High Definition quality without having to tell other people to shut up as I am trying to watch movies in a movie theater or sit in disgustingly dirty seats and listen to idiots that refuse to turn off their cellphones.

I have an HD DVD and a Blu Ray player, but I cannot wait until the LG Super player is available at a reasonable price so that everyone can enjoy both types of movies regardless of what type they are.

I have seen game systems come and go, from the Atari 2600 to the PSX.
So stacked up against a half way decent PC, all game systems are doomed
to failure, point being you can upgrade a PC but you can’t upgrade an Xbox
or any other game system. Why would I even want to waste my money on
a game console when I can just download an emulator and play Xbox or
Playstation games on my PC, in such cases when there isn’t a better
version of the same game for windows.
That being the case, my only concern is, “Can my DVD drive read it with the
right software installed?”

Just wondering where i can get these drivers for the HD dvd player. I hooked mine up and it will play normal DVD’s but not HD DVD’s, i have the 14 day trail version of intervideo WIN DVD 8 premium. NO PLAY!

I have tryed to download these drivers from your article and it brings me to rapidshare and i only get the window popping up saying file not. any direction to point me in to get these drivers would be awesome thanks.
cheers

Any word on where to get these drivers? The link in the original article leads to rapidshare where a file not available dialog is displayed.

Well if you go to newegg.com there is an internal hd-dvd drive for PCs that costs $100, so the 360 drive costs more.

How about playing XBox 360 discs on PC?

Hello guys,

so now, what are things up in linux? Does SCSI emulation starts?

greetings
surf2me

Well, everyone BUT newegg has it for $50, and you get one free movie with it, plus you can mail in for five more.

You need an UDF driver for your O/S. Be careful, a lot of the online, downloadable, UDF drivers are from BEFORE XP, and don’t work well with XP.

$49 at Bestbuy now.

I just got one for hacking!

Your Wrong, the 360 HD-DVD Drive is now only $50

Well with the Xbox add-on now only $50 sounds like a great bargain if you need an external drive for a PC.

Can you get 1080P out of it on a PC (obviously with the right hardware in the PC, i.e. a HDMI output)?

Or how easy is it to copy the movies to a MediaDrive?

Local K-Mart has these XBox 360 drives for $50.

Ok so it’s March 7th and HD is going bye bye….their selling the player at Micro Center near me in Saint Davids PA for $49. Makes it a much more affordable option even if you want to use it as a standard dvd player on the Xbox to avoid burning out the system laser playing movies.

Is there any other place or anyone that is willing to share the drivers? Now with HD Dvd dead, we need to take the content from it and move to the PC or a Blue Ray disk ?? Thanks

I tried the Windvd 8 with no luck. I then bought Powerdvd Ultra off the Ebay for about $6 and It plays Hd dvd Flawlessly. I Only paid $8 for the Windvd 8 Platnum
from ebay so I am not out a lot of money. I will probably install it on another PC
just for standard DVD’s. $56 dollars for a Hd dvd player that works on my 100″
projection Home Theater is great. I do have a Nvidia 8600gt Graphics card with HDMI out for my projector. I just Watched Planet Earth That my sister gave me for my birthday and it was unbelievable.

Hello all,
One question
Is it possible to connect this drive internally to the PC?
Via SATA connection?
Any walkthroughs would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

To all the noobs that put money into HD DVD…Toshiba and Microsoft would like to thank you for the b*%^ job!

Now you’re left with c|_|m on your faces and nothing to watch in full-HD! haha

hey question would u know it u buy a blu ray drive for ur pc would it work in a xbox360 hddvd housing? and maybe play with the xbox 360?

if it is possible. to use your xbox 360 componets modded, streaming through your pc ( to fit the needs of this project) unit with mods like a m360 board redone. we are interested. if it has been tesed on live multi and has been beta tested. we are very interested including xbx 36 software mods as well. a complete package makes live happy if this is service of yours please email and you can get started price is always an object but if you have the obility and resources its a what ever. if this is not a service of yours and can give a referral to someone that does we have more then one order if its complete.

thank you,

a family of gamers forever