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HD-DVD Confirmed For Xbox 360
JorgeDeLaCancha writes "Microsoft has recently confirmed plans to bring an external HD-DVD drive to the Xbox 360. This has been previously speculated numerous times, with Bill Gates himself stating 'future versions of Xbox 360 will incorporate an additional capacity of an HD-DVD player.' Do consumers even want another format war?"
This makes total sense. Many people are using their current box as a Windows Media extender. Personally I hate the Windows Media box since it locks you in, but this will feed right into the wants and desires of those users. And on the format war side of things. I think Microsoft is going to brute force the format they want, and this is just one of the ways they are going to try to do it.
No, of course consumers don't want another format war. However, consumers don't get to directly decide which formats companies choose to put forth. Just because consumers don't want a format war doesn't mean they won't get one.
Of course, they can always end one very rapidly by not buying one format.
--
RumorsDaily
Another large external attachment
:)
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the PS2 has a harddrive but nobody uses it. The device didnt ship with the product so, to reach the widest audience, games are created with the assumption that it isnt there-- wont the same thing happen for this drive?
AFAIK Microsoft have said all games will be on DVD, the HD-DVD drive is for movie playback only I guess.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
Why would anyone buy an HD-DVD player that has to be connected to an XBOX360 instead of being directly connected to the TV?
Especially when everyone knows that console add-ons are notoriously overpriced!
So...MS is selling a system that already has two price points: one for the basic system, and one for the system including the HDD. And now they're planning to also sell yet another add-on device - moreover, one which won't even enhance the gaming experience, but simply had movie playback functionality?
Who do they think is going to buy it? It's one thing when people decided to get a PS2 because they didn't have a DVD player. It's another thing entirely to expect people to buy an expensive add-on to an expensive system just so they can have a sub-par player of movies sold on an expensive medium.
MS should either have waited until they could cram the drive into the console, or cut bait on HD-DVD entirely. Their current strategy is a born loser.
And I say this as someone who likes the XBox, and fully intends to get a 360 at some point in the near future. I can't wait to see what the average "I AHTES TEH M$!!!11ONEONEONE" thinks of this...and I'm not even going to bother mentioning the...er, dubious...claim that the 360 is going to be the fastest selling console of all time.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
I know it hasn't even come out yet, but Microsoft is sorry to have to announce a shortage of the HD-DVD drives for the Xbox 360. Please be patient, our gnomes are working as fast as they can to get more out by the end of this year.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Will there be an HDMI output cable for the Xbox 360 then? AFAIK, HD DVD requires HDCP which requires HDMI (or a DVI port that supports HDCP). Just curios - anyone have any info on this?
I'm confused.The XBox 360 only outputs component for HD. Either this HD-DVD add-on outputs HDMI (or DVI/HDCP) on its own, or Microsoft is planning a DRM war with the media companies. What's going on?
But if you can slap on an external HD-DVD you could probably slap on an external Blu-Ray. A year from now if Sony and Blu-Ray have won the format war with only Blu-Ray movies readily available, will Bill bite the bullet and also make an external Blu-Ray available? Would Sony let them? Could Sony prevent it legally?
Letter To Iran
Games made for HD-DVD won't even work for early adopters of the 360. Those of you who shelled out $399, or worse, $700 or more for an ebay'd 360, will have to come back and buy an aftermarket HD-DVD player for God knows how much ($500 as of now). A future Xbox 360 with a HD-DVD player will most certainly cost well to the north of $299 or $399. Xbox 360 game makers may well go for the lowest common denominator which will hobble the usefulness of HD-DVD on that system for a critical amount of time.
Shades of the PS2 hard drive debacle.
or:
Consumers, hold onto your wallets!
This makes things quite interesting for when the PS3 comes out with a Blu-Ray drive, which I'm sure will be sold at a near equal premium price. If the PS3 includes Blu-Ray as standard equipment and doesn't pull a "ps2 hard drive" flop, the PS3 will no doubt be well to the north of $399 but at least all users, including early adopters, will be able to play all PS3 games.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
With any newly released format drive, the cost will be astronomical. Remember when DVD drives were released, and then DVD-writables? Until the technology is cheap and plentiful, these drives are going to cost a lot on both the producer and consumer end. Does anyone think that MS is going to bite the cost and sell it on the red? Do they really think they are going to make money this way? I understand that Sony is also including their technology in the PS3, but they don't contract out for their production so costs can be reigned in and margins met.
That being said, I can imagine that if the peripheral for the 360 is significantly cheaper than the stand alone PC or home player drives, that this will push the MS agenda of creating a huge market draw for the 360 longterm while also promoting the HD-DVD format. And MS has always shown that they believe in the "spend money to make money" philosophy, so who knows?
All I'm saying is that if you just shelled out $500 for a system and maybe a few "eh" games (still waiting on Oblivion), is a $200-$300 or greater purchase in your plans for 2006? Or maybe you're gonna get some more games.
I am and always will be a stereotype, because who in their right mind prefers mono?
...this is quite as bad an idea as it might first appear.
First runs of new format players are pretty expensive. From the earlier article on here, the cheapest HD-DVD player is about 500 dollars. Given that it's just the drive, and doesn't need all the bits the Xbox already has (for converting the signal to different displays, power supply etc) it should be smaller and cheaper than a full player. Yes it's an addon box, but it's probably the cheapest way for someone with a 360 to get HD-DVD as well.
Of course, PS3 will have a BluRay player built in, but will be more expensive than the 360 is now, never mind any possible price decrease between now and then. Time will tell, I suppose!
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But this is microsoft though, they may try to take a Halo game and put it on HD-DVD to try and push it since they can lose money left and right to force their way in.
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I would guess that the drive would be for movie playback. I, for one, will still purchase a seperate player for whatever format wins. I personally think using a game system for movie playback is dumb, but there is a % of people who will use it for that. I really can't see people buying either a 360 or PS3 just to watch movies on.
The drive itself won't be for games, as really, the need is not here yet. How many games, besides FF style games need multiple discs? Even newer games, like NBA Live 2k5 are CD-style on the PS2 (Blue discs), so I would agree that, for the time being, a DVD is plenty of space. For a few select games, there will be some disc-swapping going on, but really, I don't remember the uproar about FF needing 4 discs and to be swapped durring the game.
On a PC, thats a little diffrent story. With 200+ GB drives becoming standard, software developers will grow to fill the space quicker then on the console. Thinking offhand, it would be nice to have a single disc for things like encyclopedias, maps, and MSDN. Even today, its rare to find a game that requires more then a single DVD (minus games like Command & Conquer that use multiple discs to allow game play on multiple machines)
I guess at this point, its way to early to claim either side has won, buts its funny to hear the FUD being thrown around (Sony, I am looking at you about the whole 1080p "True HDTV" thing)
I think that is why they didn't try to squeeze the drive into the package of the next version (XBOX 361?).
Hell most production companies are not even moving to HD yet. 99% of all commercials are still SD and every single Production company from commercials to cableTv to even episodic (no not the very few that are in HD because they are high profile) are mostly ignoring a move to even creating HD content for another 3 years. Besides high bandwidth HD content that needs bluray or HDDVD is not the only game. mpeg4 and Microsofts own offering can put a full movie in HD resolution and clarity as well as all the other goodies in a single dual layer DVD easily.
I would love to sell all the production gear and get a bunch of XL1HD cameras replace all the AVID stations with new Apple HD editing stations but the demand for HD content from the people that pay for it (companies wanting it produced) is less than 1 tenth of 1 percent. we get more wanting it shot on film than in HD or any aspect ratio other than 4:3. Granted we only do commercials here.
The need for HDDVD on a gaming system is even less. Almost all games dont even use a complete dual layer DVD.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Add another life certainty to the list of death and taxes: all Digital Rights Management and encryption schemes will [eventually] be compromised.
... has military grade security." Perhaps Microsoft should have consulted the U.S. military and inquired about the number of security protocols which have been either upgraded or entirely abandoned, based on their obsolescence. As everyone knows, the first Xbox's security measures were defeated within its first year on the market.
Early in the Xbox 1's deployment, Microsoft claimed that the "Xbox
http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/17_Mistakes_Microso ft_Made_in_the_Xbox_Security_System
This is not to say that Microsoft has not made significant improvements with respect to the Xbox 360's security framework, nor that the software programmers who designed the initial measures were at fault - Microsoft software engineers are a subset of the best programmers in the world. But any blueprint designed by fallible humans will have loopholes and areas of weakness to exploit.
Se, eventually, hackers will defeat the defensive routines built into the Xbox 360, allowing the piracy of copyrighted games and allowing basement-dwelling hackers to create homebrew software.
So why not remove at least some of the hacker's incentive to circumvent the hardware's built-in security?
The "Holy Grail" of the the hacking scene for the first Xbox was the Xbox Media Center (XBMC) application. Although Microsoft marketed limited "Media Center Extenders" to provide some additional [thoroughly limited] multimedia capabilities to the Xbox platform, the rogue hackers who created XBMC envisioned a multimedia powerhouse with support for all major audio/video codecs, allowing those who "modded" their consoles to utilize their Xbox as a first-rate multimedia center. In all honesty, no commercial enterprise has yet created software to match the capabilities of the underground XBMC project.
And now, four years later, Microsoft is making the same mistakes they made with the first iteration of their console.
The Xbox 360 is an absolute beast of a machine. With three extremely powerful CPU cores and a state-of-the-art Graphics Processing Unit, the Xbox 360 is the killer application to fuel American's current High-Definition craze. While the console has increased multimedia support [over that of the first Xbox], again, it is deliberately and significantly limited.
Want to stream video over your home network to your Xbox 360? Sure, but only if you have a PC with Windows XP Media Center Edition, and then only for certain Microsoft-approved codecs. [Note to Microsoft Vice Presidents: ignoring the XviD and DivX codecs will not make them go away.] Artificially limiting the multimedia capabilities of what could truly be the most significant piece of consumer electronics on the market will not reduce the incentive for hackers to add the capabilities which should have been designed into the console since its inception.
For example: the Sony PlayStation 3 console will have support for Blu-Ray High-Definition DVD movies, and this capability will undoubtedly ignite the next wave of Hollywood's eternal re-release of the same movies in higher-quality gloss. The Xbox 360 has this very capability, today, on standard DVD9 media, but Microsoft has deliberately omitted this feature. The WMV-HD codec can produce gorgeous High-Definition audio/video content, but despite pioneering the effort to have feature films released in WMV-HD format, none of the WMV-HD DVDs on the market work with the console. Despite the fact that the Xbox 360 is placed in the very heart of the home-theater space, connected to all of the consumer electronics required to demonstrate the capabilities of the WMV-HD initiative, you still need a Windows PC to play any of the WMV-HD DVD releases. This is the very definition of a wasted opportunity.
So, this leads to a
The question ("Do consumers even want another format war?") makes a false assumption. Although it's off by only one single letter. The right question is:
Do consumers ever want another format war?
And the right answer is: no
Do consumers even want another format war?
I still am waiting for a format for burnable DVD's.
It's not really a format war if every DVD drive manufactured supports both formats. I used to think that, eventually, the industry would finally settle on one type of rewriteable DVD media (btw, I thought + would win), but it's now 2006 and there are no signs of either side giving in. Last year I've finally made my peace with this so called format war and bought a DVD rewriter. I've been happily burning my videos onto DVD and freeing tons of HD space in the process. Deciding on which type of media to buy isn't even really a concern to me anymore, I mean, what's the difference if every drive out there can read them both? Personally, I stick with + because it is technically superior. Anyway, people keep comparing the +/- to the old BETA/VHS debate, but there's one very important difference that many seem to overlook: the VHS and BETA players couldn't handle the competitor's format. As a result, consumers were forced to pick one over the other; and when they did, it was over for BETA. The +/- format war on the other hand, isn't likely to ever end because drives can easily support both types of media. With high quality drives from brands such as NEC going for approximately $40 bucks, just go out and buy one already and enjoy. There is no +/- format war.
All this talk of add on drives reminds me of the Dreamcast and the persistant rumours of a DVD drive.
Before the PS2 was released there were so many people saying they would wait for the PS2 because it was also a DVD player that rumours began floating around that either a new Dreamcast with a DVD drive or an external drive would be released.
The DVD drive was never officially announced though, whether it was just a rumour or something based in fact I don't know. What I do remember was instead of it helping people to commit to buying a Dreamcast it just made people decide to wait for one with a DVD drive. Given that the rumour acted as a spoiler on sales I often wonder if it really came from Sega or actually Sony...
So with the 360 we have a white console with VGA out and Sega games launched roughly a year before the next Sony console. It would be perfect deja vu except I'm sure Gates' pockets are deep enough to fund the 360 no matter what.
Anyway, I'm dubious as to how soon we'll see an HD-DVD drive for the 360, this announcement strikes me more as a way to hook those saying they'll get a PS3 because of Blu-ray.
the X360 A/V architecture is pretty open ended. For instance, you can get a VGA pack for it to drive VGA displays directly.
I can't say for sure that an HDCP/HDMI output box is a sure-thing, but there was a lot of flexibility designed in up front, so i think its very possible.
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Why do people on Slashdot keep bitching about a "format war?" It's called competition in a free market, this freedom of choice thing you guys keep talking about.
The better format--be that image quality, more supported titles, cheaper players, whatever--will win out. That's how it's supposed to be, and that makes it better for consumers because both formats will try to undercut each other, which means cheaper prices and better players.
Stop bitching about a format war! Welcome it!
"Sufferin' succotash."
It's for watching movies. No one has to support it. This is a convergence thing, most HDTV's only have a single DVI or HDMI input on them. It makes sense to have a single box that provides all your HD content since it's so much easier to run out of inputs.
I like it because it will take up one shelf in my entertainment center instead of 2 (console + HDDVD player).
The article you linked to has the REAL reason HD-DVD may win:
Am I the only one who remembers why USB 2.0 replaced Firewire in next generation PC standards? It was Apple's demand for a mere measly $1 per port licensing fee (admittedly on $30 is freaking enormous compared to this in the world of razor-thin PC profit-margins.
On the other hand, the PS3 will come with Bluray. That's its biggest saving grace. Even if Windows doesn't support Bluray, Sony or someone will be sure to write drivers for it, and Windows will thus have to support it in some fashion unless they take really blatantly illegal moves to block it. As is, MS is already treading on thin ice with their current actions.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Somewhere, there was a schedule slip. A bad one.
Check what's happening on Ebay. Early on, Xbox units were selling at high premiums. That's over. Core systems sold for $330 today. At $355, core systems don't sell. That's an unopened price; used systems are down to $200 or so. Many speculators who bought systems for resale are still trying to unload them, and they're not making money when they do.
This is not a "must have" product any longer.
Well, that doesn't say much. Anandtech doesn't say much either:
So maybe there will need to be a new revision, but maybe not, because it uses an ATI GPU, and they might have tucked it in.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"