Has anyone picked up the HD-DVD add on for their 360? I grabbed one tonight for $160 from Circuit City. I wasn't sure about getting one at first, but the $160 deal was good enough to make me check out. The player comes bundled with King Kong and a remote control. I haven't had much time to play with it yet, but Kong looked really nice on my HD set and the frame rate seemed great. I'll give more impressions later this week, after I pick up some more movies, if anyone is interested.
When I watch HD trailers on my 360, I can always notice at least a little bit of jerkiness. It's hard to notice if you aren't looking for it, but it's there. Do you notice that with HD-DVD's? Plus, I thought it was going for $200.
I've noticed jerkiness watching HD trailers on my 360, but none with the HD-DVD drive. In fact, it loads and plays quite quickly. It does go for $200, but I got a CC $40 off coupon in the mail when I changed my address. I think there are copies of it online. Overall, if you have a 360 and want to give HD movies a shot, I can recommend this product (so far).
I plan I picking one up, and using the CC coupon. I have a netflix subscription so getting movies en masse for cheap is no problem, and I recently bought a HDTV. And the fact that it can work with PC really put me over the edge
have you tried other media in it? Does it play Game Discs, CD, or DVD? Does a second "Drive" appear lower in the Dashboard when its connected?
Nice video with impressions of it. http://kotaku.com/gaming/top/360-hddvd-impressions-214121.php http://www.joystiq.com/2006/11/11/hands-on-the-xbox-360-hd-dvd-drive/ I thought M$ was dumb by not releasing the X360 with it, but now i see they got it right. With all this "format war" simply not going anywhere (in my opinion both will fail), they gave us the opportunity to choose. So, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is better than DVD, but the majority of people still don't care or want to spend a insane ammount of money on a TV just for this (since even in Japan and USA HDTV channels aren't the standard either).
I attached a copy of the coupon. It says "no photocopies or reproductions," but people have generally been having success with printing it out. Otherwise, you can usually find an original copy of the coupon on eBay or craigslist. It's definitely worthwhile if you're on the fence about taking the plunge into HD movies, the $160 price point was plenty cheap enough for me to give it a shot. I'd imagine this same coupon will work on the Wii also (bringing the price down to $210) or pretty much any combination of products that gets you to the $200 mark. Using it to get a 360 core for $259 doesn't seem like too bad of a deal either. I haven't tried other media in it, but I've read that game discs don't work at this point. I'll give all kinds of different media a shot later and report back. The drive comes with an installation CD that you stick into the 360 and takes mere seconds to complete. Once that's done the dashboard lets you control both drives with a relatively slick interface. I was also impressed that you can open the drive to take discs out without turning your 360 on. Not a big deal I suppose, but I thought it showed some impressive attention to detail. Also, if any of you still don't want to invest too much into HD movies until a format is chosen, Tower records has some pretty decent deals on HD-DVDs. Since the stores are going out of business, movies are 30% of and getting lower every week. There's generally a very good HD-DVD and Blu-Ray selection because no one has players. Moreover, Amazon seems to have some of the best prices on the web for HD-DVDs. From either of these sources it's possible to get HD-DVD movies for $20 or less.
I heard that this was true also. I'll try hooking mine up to my windows computer tonight and let everyone know the results.
It seems that Windows will recognize the drive, but will not play HD-DVDs. Instead, it will only play standard DVDs. With this said, there are drivers out there that will make it play HD-DVDs in Windows. These aren't some hack-job drivers either, they are ones made by Toshiba specifically to read UDF v2.5 on first generation HD-DVDrom drives. If you're familiar at all with the Xbox modding scene you'll know where to find the drivers when I say to check "the usual channels." So, if you're interested in using the drive on your PC, it's very possible and quite easy. UPDATE: Just found this handy little link that provides the drivers and shows just how easy it is to get up and running on a PC: http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/11/8303/
