Posted Sep 8, 2008 7:18 pm GMT

haha and the price is still the same even though hd dvd is dead. was there even an hdmi plug in for this thing???

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Jul 21, 2008 7:30 pm GMT

no

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Jul 16, 2008 5:45 pm GMT

Did they stop making these?

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Jun 14, 2008 11:42 am GMT

blu ray is waay better

• Login to rate this comment

Posted May 12, 2008 5:37 pm GMT

blu-ray is better anyways

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Mar 14, 2008 2:47 pm GMT

bleh I'm soo use to watching DVD's that I prolly wouldnt notice the difference

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Mar 6, 2008 11:30 am GMT

SS4_Goku, A well composed post mate. PS i own a 360 (my choice).

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Mar 3, 2008 1:42 pm GMT

I got mine for 50 bucks.... nice

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Mar 1, 2008 1:04 am GMT

I just bought one, even though HD DVD lost the format war to Blu-Ray Disc. I'm going to enjoy a bunch of awesome HD DVD movies until the price of Blu-Ray players drop so that I can buy one.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Feb 28, 2008 12:57 am GMT

I'm sure these are going to be worth more in a good 15 yrs

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Feb 21, 2008 3:10 pm GMT

HD-DVD has sadly been defeated by Blu-Ray.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Feb 16, 2008 10:59 pm GMT

Damn I heard they were loosing the HDDVD format war to blu-ray because I was thinkin about pickin one of these up but im a little wary now about buying it

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Feb 16, 2008 10:32 pm GMT

I really doubt that a USb( a USB man) can really put out HD visuals in the time needed and still be as good as it if you just buy a HD DVD player.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Feb 15, 2008 7:25 pm GMT

I think that it is a great idea to please both types of consumers in this type of console upgrade. I love how MS has given the option to the consumer to, buy it if they want too. Technology has started to improve SO rapidly that we as consumers often find companies Including unwanted technology that hikes up the price of the console considerably, when we would have been happy with a downgraded version for $200 cheaper. I mean, look at what they have done with the Elite system for the 360! If you want to shell out the extra cash then go rite ahead, but if you just want to upgrade your existing system with a 120 GB HD and any other accessories... then you can purchase them separately.

MS is allowing its consumers to customize their consoles to fit what they want out of their systems, whether its a cheaper console package, or a HD-DVD player, or a cheaper console package with a HD-DVD player. Simplicity and the availability of customizable features are what have, and will continue to make me a happy console player by allowing "ME" to make the choice for myself, instead of being forced to buy something that I don't want, and wont use.

Thanks MS for giving me the choice!

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Feb 1, 2008 12:44 am GMT

Hmm.....

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Jan 8, 2008 4:33 pm GMT

I would really like this, i might buy it but i think M$ are releaseing another console with it built in. Saves the space and i may as well buy that and give my 360 my girlfriend or somone.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Jan 8, 2008 2:26 pm GMT

O.K. I'm not slating any console in particular here. I'm just stating my beliefs. I own all the latest consoles and play each one regularly. So If I get any hate mail I will just laugh at you. But on the matter of this topic I believe the whole multi functionality that these new machines include is beginning to get a bit over the top in my opinion. I mean why pay 280 - 425 pounds for a machine that is supposedly to play games on to watch a dvd that gets upscaled or a blu ray or HD-DVD. I mean you can go watch the same film in the cinema for about 5 pound minus snacks if its a more recent film. or if its a bit older you could rent the film for like £3.80 from your local blockbuster for like a whole week. as it is at the moment in the U.K. there really isn't really a big selection of these next generation versions available for many movie titles and mostly the larger catalogs of these versions are only available from game shops. and that number diminishes to an even lower quantity when it comes to renting them. and these films cost about 20-25 pounds a piece and all they do is let you watch a film your really only going to get a true rush out of once in a while or even a lifetime. Plus watching a film on an X-box 360 really isn't an enjoyable experience as the fan whir is way to loud. and besides the technology behind these players is still in its early development. the players will be a lot more sturdier in the future and will last a lot longer than the ones out now. So unless your really well off and like to gloat that you have the latest releases on blu ray or HD-DVD my advice is just stick to the good old DVD format for now and wait until they lower in price by quite a bit.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Jan 2, 2008 6:37 pm GMT

Hmm, if this unit ever comes in black - I might get one, just because - not much of a movie person

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Jan 2, 2008 5:23 pm GMT

well if either formats become popular microsoft is going to be mad as they want to be the rescuers (downloadablt movies)

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 26, 2007 9:08 am GMT

DVD Upscaling for the win. HDDVD and Blu-Ray are both going through puberty right now lol, I'll wait until they grow up.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 22, 2007 6:27 pm GMT

The hd lookms nice

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 17, 2007 1:15 pm GMT

personally the only time i watch movies is either at night on the tv, at the cinema, very rarely on a dvd player or my xbox 360 so i dont really care much for this subject.

although the picture is better it does not really bother me in movies or seem that noticeable, when im gaming in 720p yeah but movies im not bothered about.

i own an xbox 360 but its a fact that blu ray will win but DVD will still be in for a long time just because of the fact that not too many people think its worth an upgrade

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 15, 2007 5:25 pm GMT

blue ray is to dvd as laser disc is to dvd, since everyone allready has functional dvd players or hd players, no one really wants to pay $200 more on a blueray player to have the same fantastic view of hd. but i guess its whatever floats your boat, or raft, or floatational device.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 15, 2007 7:36 am GMT

why everyone's saying that it should have been included on the 360 at first?? the price would have been higher too so let give consummers the choice of having it or not!! If sony would had tought of this before, maybe they would sale more...

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 12, 2007 3:05 am GMT

First Of All, YES, I do own a PS3 And probably won't ever buy an X-Box. But everyone whose talking crap about Sony's PS3 and Blu-Ray, admit it, it's because you're all about Microsoft and I respect that. I've chosen to use Microsoft Windows on My PC and I don't ever plan on buying an Apple so I mean I like Microsoft. I own a PS1,PS2 and PS3 and I love everything Sony Because It's My Choice, I'm not rich so I don't buy the really Expensive Sony Gear. The HDDVD Player for the X-Box360 should be included on the System so that people don't have to spend money and time on the Upgrade. Abut HD, where's everybody shopping at, the Games for X-Box and PS3 cost the same. The Blu-Ray and HDDVD Movies also cost the same, I saw some HDDVD's costing a few dollars more(Best Buy.Com). On top of all Blu-Ray is outselling HDDVD. I mean it's unproven technology but so all future technology has to be based on DVD, how do we know if Blu-Ray works if we don't try it out, if Sony fails again then be it, at least they're tryings new things and they'll loose money not the consumers. I mean Blu-Ray Movies look beautiful and so do HDDVD and about Blu-Rays Getting scratched easier, well don't let the kids play with them.
On the Console Prices, I want to ask everybody, How many consoles do you buy a year? I've only had to buy a PS1,PS2 and PS3 once each in 11 Years(1996-2007). After every console's release and the prices start dropping, even if the difference between them is $100 dollars it still comes down to plain an simple, CHOICE!!!! You know every one is going to keep their system of choice for at least 5 or so years until a new console is released. The game performance on the PS3 and X-Box360 isn't Gigantic and the Multimedia features have to be there or it wouldn't be a Next-Gen system.(Before, Radio Tuners,MP3 Players,Video Players, Etc, each did their own thing and now a single one does all that) Blu-Ray and HD-DVD should be included in their respective systems and yes they HD does look better than Standard Definition, unless your're blind. I don't think anybody is forcing people to buy HDTVs it's just the flow of technolgy and they've gotten cheaper since it's introduction. Competition is needed or there's no improvement.
The only thing I have to say is for people to stop talking about the PS3 like it's worth nothing, because it must be worth something since it' has all of you talking about it so much.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 11, 2007 6:39 pm GMT

SUX!!! THEY BETTER INCLUDE THAT SOON.....FOR $349

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 11, 2007 4:55 pm GMT

I cannot complain, I got it for less than $125.00 (US). The picture quality is great, even if you dont get into HDDVD. It can upscale standards DVDs to a degree. I've been very pleased with the purchase.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 7, 2007 5:54 pm GMT

As much as I love Xbox I'll never buy this drive. For a start it costs too much for something that should have came with my 360 but more importantly I really don't think that HD-DVD is the best format. Theres just not enough storage capacity on it for a full length film plus special features. Correct me if im wrong but is the data stream rate not better on Blu-Ray. Don't see me as a Sony fanboy or whatever I have no preference over either I chose to buy the 360 cause it was better value for money but Microsoft surely should have realised that a DVD add on is jus going to look like there askin the consumers for more money. Then again HVD Holographic Video Disk technology is nearing with capacities of 100GB and up and I can't see either format being able to hold the 2160p 100GB films of 2009... except that Blu-Ray can hold 100GB possibly more. Who knows but I'm not payin £100 for a HDDVD drive!

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 4, 2007 1:57 pm GMT

@raghraghragh and the rest of you who agree with him.

Your thinking is flawed if you want to make a grand sweeping statement that the industry has changed over the past 25 years. US sales figures actually support the complete opposite of what you are saying. Porn DVD revenues actually match the revenues for the rest of the movie industry. So the porn industry does in fact NEED a physical format to distribute their materials. Also, it is not a matter of what is easier and more cost effective: it is about a balance between reaching all forms of consumers, including those who do not invest in high bandwidth. If your reasoning were true, iTunes marketplace movie sales would be more effective than regular DVD sales or at least making a move.

Me > You

On the other hand it is only fair to point out that BluRay is outselling HDDVD in Europe 2to1 as of the end of November.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Nov 30, 2007 10:40 pm GMT

@bubbalooga and the rest of you who think the porn industry matters.

Your thinking is flawed. The porn industry is a very different beast than it was 25 years ago. Thanks to high-speed broadband, the porn industry no longer 'needs' a physical format to distribute their materials when it's much easier and more cost effective to release the movies over the internet.

Another thing worth mentioning...who WANTS HD porn? I ceratinly don't want to see STDs and surgical scars in all their HD glory.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Apr 16, 2007 11:09 pm GMT

i have noticed some people among the crowd are very smart.
HyperMetaDragon HumanoMexicano NorwegianWinter DPRbassman and so on.

Im not sure if any1 remembers a very long time ago, when VHS were launching, Sony Brought out BETA 1 or 2 or sumthing. now apparently the porno industry decided to go with normal VHS cassettes instead of the BETA 1/2. and they crashed and burned compared to regular VHS systems.

people, its the same with Sony Blu-ray and HD DVD. porno once again has chosen the right path in taking HD DVD as their next gen marketing scheme. HD-DVD for the win

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Feb 28, 2007 11:03 pm GMT

Does the HD DVD drive upscale DVD's better than the standard 360 DVD drive? I read all these articles about it upscaling and looking good but the 360 has always been able to upscale DVD's to the VGA resolution you have set if using the VGA cables??

I expected maybe the HD DVD drive would allow upscaling via component, that's why people have praised it. But it appears 480p is the limit for DVD upscaling on Component.

So has anyone tested DVD upscaling via VGA on the HD DVD drive and then the standard DVD drive to see if there is any advantage of the HD DVD in DVD playback? Hopefully it's not just a marketing ploy for the general public that up until now havn't purchased a VGA cable, but are now being told to because it will upscale your DVD's...when this has always been the case.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Feb 6, 2007 2:51 pm GMT

HD-DVD is the way to go!

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Feb 1, 2007 7:57 pm GMT

Well blue ray will not sell...so I buy this.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Feb 1, 2007 6:57 pm GMT

HD DVD owns.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Jan 30, 2007 6:56 pm GMT

i want one. little to much money for now though when im not sure if bluray or hd dvd is gonna win. im pulling for hd dvd though cause of the price and that i can flip most the discs over and play them in the other room since i only have one hdtv.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Jan 23, 2007 9:47 pm GMT

I'll take one.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Jan 21, 2007 6:21 am GMT

MS is just trying to add fuel to the HD DVD vs Blu Ray War. If MS were going to have HD, they should of had it built in and allowed the games and movies to be in HD. I think that they made this mistake before? DVD Player Add on for the Xbox! When will MS learn.

It's quite lame that they have to make people buy add on's, when Sony has it standard on ps3 20g and 60g hdd. I have just read reviews on the web about it and the Hype about the HD DVD addon. It isn't against PS3 or overly blu ray. it's basically hyped on how much cheaper it is that a normal HD DVD player. Oh the bargin! I'm sorry but more people will have a Blu ray player thru Sony than a HD DVD player with Xbox 360. You can count 100% that All ps3 owners will have Blu ray where as what 50% or less will have the add on for xbox 360. Therefore Blu ray will have the upper hand. PS3 and Blu Ray ftw

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Jan 1, 2007 6:50 am GMT

Is it multiregion? Im in Japan and it`s cheaper over here

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 21, 2006 6:59 pm GMT

Tubedogg, couldn't say it any better. One extra detail about the HDDVD vs. Blu-ray is that that memory stored on the blu-ray is stored on the upper layer of the disk, which can be scratched alot easier. The HDDVD however, stores its memory on the lower layer of the disk and protects the data alot more than the Blu-ray does.

In future gaming, Xbox 360 will likely support their games on the HD-DVD.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 20, 2006 8:04 am GMT

ditto tubedogg, ditto. but also factor in that about 90 percent of HDTV owners have never heard of Blu-Ray and you have your answer. Funny isnt it, how some companies can explain their products to the laman in its name HDDVD, a DVD in HD, what the hell is Blu-Ray.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 19, 2006 7:47 am GMT

This is where microsoft is wrong, who else would spend 200$ (same as PS3 price, albiet less features) for movies? And the worst thing and though understandably, it has no gaming purpose.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 18, 2006 12:45 pm GMT

That's a cool device but I've only just bought an Xbox 360. Gonna try and get this still though.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 17, 2006 3:20 pm GMT

tubedogg is pure genious! lol hope that quiets all the fan boys (like thats possible) im undecided on a purchase like this. some say its a lot of money for a little improvement, which in some ways is true. but at the same time i have a 50 inch sony tv ( i kno ironic right?) with full surround sound setup and a leather recining couch from the heavens so it also seems to me that taking advantage of higher quality movies with extra storage seems to be worth the price tag....im just gald i get to choose myself instead of companies choosing for me **cough** sony**cough**

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 17, 2006 9:45 am GMT

"And to make games in High Def, game companies will want/need to use HDDVD"

Right, cause you know Gears of War looks like absolute crap in hi-def. Or Oblivion. Or Rainbow Six: Vegas. Or any of the other graphically beautiful games that have come out over the past year for 360, that all look amazing in hi-def. On a standard DVD-9. The average amount of space that an original Xbox game took up was 2GB to 3GB (of a 9GB DVD). And a good chunk of PS2 games fit on a regular CD-ROM -- which holds 700MB max!

Sony is trying to convince you that the space is necessary, in order to make you believe that including the Blu-Ray drive was a necessity for gaming and not just a sad attempt to force it into being the de facto next-gen DVD standard. Maybe their game developers are too stupid to know how to use compression, I don't know. But the basic fact is, that if their marquee game that "proved" the need for Blu-Ray (Resistance: Fall of Man) didn't include the movies and languages for every region (in other words, if they had made one disc for each language instead of putting them all on one), it would have fit on a standard DVD-9. I much prefer the approach Microsoft took: let each consumer make up their mind if they want (or need) to spend the extra money on the HD-DVD drive. People with standard definition TVs will get exactly 0 benefit from either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, yet Sony decided that you need it anyway, so therefore you will pay extra to get it.


"And I doubt that HD-DVD will become the 360 standard any time soon, because people aren't going to want to spend $200 to upgrade a one year old system in order to play new games on it."

Microsoft has explicity stated time and time again that GAMES WILL NOT BE RELEASED ON HD-DVD. If you need any more proof of this, consider the fact that it is connected via a standard USB 2.0 port, running at (a theoretical maximum of) 480Mbits/ps. I would bet anything that any developer will tell you it is not possible to run a 360-level game off an external drive that is connected at that speed. By the time the drive finds and reads the data, then sends it over the cable, you have lost a *lot* of time (granted measured in the milliseconds but in game programming that is an eternity).


To the person who said that Microsoft will release an uber-360 with the HD-DVD drive built-in (and therefore it would allow games to be put on HD-DVD), I would say that Microsoft is too smart at this point to fracture their console base like that. Then again they did create the core pack that doesn't come with a hard drive. So, maybe they aren't that smart.


The bottom line is this: Sony, the company that brought you Betamax, MiniDisc, and UMD, now wants you to buy into Blu-Ray. (Yes, those formats are all dead or all-but-dead. That's the point.) They don't have a good track record on launching new, proprietary formats. And to those who say that the failure of Blu-Ray won't kill the company...well, it probably won't outright kill it, but Sony has *a lot* riding on Blu-Ray. If Blu-Ray flops as fantastically as I think it's going to, it is going to take a major dent out of them, and they will lose a lot more of their (already severely diminished) credibility. The facts remain: Blu-Ray is more expensive to manufacture discs for, it is based on less-tested/-proven technology, and it is functionally equivelant to HD-DVD. And I don't see any of those points changing (except since Sony will keep pushing Blu-Ray and forcing games to be on Blu-Ray discs for the forseeable future, the cost of manufacturing discs for it may drop).

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 16, 2006 6:34 pm GMT

man all of you people are on crack..

this will _NOT_ support playing games.. you only need this if you have a HD ready tv
if u wanna spend $20-30 extra on a bit higher quality then dvd.. be my guest... i have got over 300 dvd movies and i am not rebuilding my collection biatches

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 13, 2006 8:39 pm GMT

So what you're saying is that, unlike PS3, we have a choice to have 300 nexgen players in our console? That means i dont need to pay 500-600$ to play a few games with a player i wont even use! Wow M$ you are great. Gotta love peripherals.

• Login to rate this comment

Posted Dec 13, 2006 9:48 am GMT

Ill wait for more movies to come out. Normal DVD is fine for me.

• Login to rate this comment