360 HD DVD drive on PC: That Didn’t Take Long
Xbox-Scene.com is reporting that the Xbox 360 HD DVD addon drive has been opened and shown to be running on Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X. Pretty cool, considering that this means you can buy an HD DVD drive for your PC for under US$200 while there aren’t any other internal or external stand-alone HD DVD drives on the U.S. market at this time.
Makes me wonder if Microsoft left the drive this hackable on purpose. It would make for an interesting gambit in the Format Wars. And that starts to make sense when you consider this report from X-S.com:
In case you missed the news Saturday on xbox-scene, Toshiba drivers have been released on net net that will allow Windows XP to recognize the Xbox360 HD-DVD addon if you connect it via USB with your PC.
The guys over at 360insider.net even say Windows Vista has the drivers built-in. Apparently the drive will be recognized and automatically installed on Windows Vista. . . .
They also connected the addon with Mac OSX … it was automatically recognized, and when a DVD disc was inserted the “DVD Player” application included in the OS started doing its thing. However they could not test HD-DVD movies as Mac OSX has no player for these discs yet.
Interesting… very interesting. I can’t wait to see if this kind of HD DVD cross-pollination takes hold. It should give Blu-ray some good competition in the PC space. Which is always a good thing.
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