External USB HD DVD Drive.

[Uber Uberest ~Rathe]

http://www.betanews.com/article/Xbox...med/1147106479

Discuss?

[Szlia]

Pointless as an accessory. It's about as silly as adding a proper DVD drive to the GameCube or something.

It will have limited support by games since it's an accessory that do not provide the same significant boost CD-Rom drive provided 16-bit console and their 2 meg cartridges and people will want to buy a proper drive to watch movies. A very low price tag compared to dedicated drives could be an asset though.

Anyway that HD-DVD drive should have been in the Xbox 360 from the get go to make it a true HD generation machine. But is the market ready for a true HD machine and the cost it implies? We get to know that in november I guess.

[Akileese]

Originally Posted by Szlia

Pointless as an accessory. It's about as silly as adding a proper DVD drive to the GameCube or something.

It will have limited support by games since it's an accessory that do not provide the same significant boost CD-Rom drive provided 16-bit console and their 2 meg cartridges and people will want to buy a proper drive to watch movies. A very low price tag compared to dedicated drives could be an asset though.

Anyway that HD-DVD drive should have been in the Xbox 360 from the get go to make it a true HD generation machine. But is the market ready for a true HD machine and the cost it implies? We get to know that in november I guess.

It's just there way of covering the bases. If blu-ray fails and some speculate that it will due to it's expenses, they have HD-DVD to fall back on. It's a cheap accessory (when this rumor came up they said it would be 100, about 400 less than HD-DVD players) and I'm guessing most people will buy it. It's a smart move, but I'm not sure of the gaming ramificatios.

[Vorph]

Originally Posted by Szlia

Pointless as an accessory. It's about as silly as adding a proper DVD drive to the GameCube or something.

It will have limited support by games since it's an accessory that do not provide the same significant boost CD-Rom drive provided 16-bit console and their 2 meg cartridges and people will want to buy a proper drive to watch movies. A very low price tag compared to dedicated drives could be an asset though.

Anyway that HD-DVD drive should have been in the Xbox 360 from the get go to make it a true HD generation machine. But is the market ready for a true HD machine and the cost it implies? We get to know that in november I guess.

I know a lot of people with an xbox that never bought a real DVD player (and with xbmc, it's superior to just about any DVD player you can buy too). I doubt xbmc360 can/will ever be made, so the 360 isn't quite as good an option from that standpoint, but it would still be a no-brainer to buy the add-on HD-DVD player if it's priced aggressively. Although, unless I'm remembering wrong, I could have sworn that the 360 had no HDMI or HDCP-over-DVI cables available... without that an HD-DVD player would be utterly worthless, since it's not like it's for games anyway; MS has already said that games will never use HD-DVDs.

I wonder if a third party will make a Blu-ray player for it too.