It looks as if Microsoft has shaved a little off of the price tag for its Xbox 360 HD DVD Player accessory. It was reported this morning by Major Nelson, aka Larry Hryb of Microsoft, the company was dropping the retail price from $179.99 to $129.99 and that the drop was immediately effective in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
There was no immediate word on why the price drop was made, but one has to think with the recent Toshiba HD DVD player price drops Microsoft is just trying to stay up with the pack.
Toshiba must surely have a headache by this time today. First Warner Brothers announces plans to end HD DVD support. Microsoft next comes along and indicates it might begin offering Blu-ray Disc support. Things smoothed out later however for the HD DVD camp as Microsoft backpedaled on the comments.
A Reuters interview earlier this week quoted a Microsoft marketing manager as saying his company would consider a Blu-ray option for the Xbox 360 if there was consumer demand for it. The company changed its tune quickly though after these comments were published, indicating that "HD DVD remains the only format to deliver quality experiences at affordable prices."
You can hear the sighs of relief right now coming from Japan.
The hack seems to be as simple as finding a generic HD-DVD drive driver, then getting PowerDVD or WinDVD with the HD-DVD upgrade on, then plugging in the drive over USB and sticking a disc in. Hardly rocket science!
Presumably, you could even remove the drive from the casing and plug it directly into your PC over SATA, mounting it in a spare drive bay and earning some serious kudos.
The guys from uneasysilence were able to hack the new HD DVD drive from Microsoft Xbox. Using the Cyberlink PowerDVD software you can have the cheapest HD PC on the market right now. They also have lot of about the hack. I think Microsoft should send hacking documentation with their future products. Each they are releasing a new product, hacks are on the market faster and faster. Enjoy!
Simple but good! The ad gets the point across that you can see six times as many dancers on your screen if you watch movies on HD DVD vs regular DVD. Ready to buy your HD DVD drive?
Just like we expected, Microsoft is shipping their Xbox 360 HD DVD external drive for $199.99 in the US (€199.99 in Europe and £129.99 in the UK). The package comes with Peter Jackson's King Kong and the Xbox 360 Universal Remote. The drive is expected to hit shelves on November 17th in Japan, while Microsoft is targeting mid-November for the US and Europe.
According to Digitimes and Newlauches.com, Microsoft is currently working on a new version of the Xbox 360. The new unit would be equipped with an internal HD DVD drive. Microsoft is currently selecting a manufacturer for the drive. The new version could be available in the first half of 2007.
This looks like a defensive move by Microsoft after the announcement by Sony that the PS3 would be equipped with an internal Blu-ray drive.
Microsoft is expected to launch an external HD-DVD drives for its Xbox 360 at a retail price of US$200 by Christmas of this year.
According to Digitimes Microsoft will launch external HD-DVD drives for its Xbox 360 at a retail price of US$200 by Christmas of this year, and Taiwanese games developers and gaming services providers indicated this is a smart marketing strategy as compared with Sony's adoption of built-in BD drives for its PlayStation 3 (PS3).
External drives have more flexibility than built-in models, the companies pointed out, while adding that despite BD having a much larger storage capacity than HD-DVD, pre-installation of BD drives may decrease the market competitiveness of PS3 units.
Microsoft adopted HD-DVD instead of BD mainly because HD-DVD is compatible with existing DVD formats while also having much lower production costs, the Taiwanese companies noted.
It looks as if Microsoft has shaved a little off of the price tag for its Xbox 360 HD DVD Player accessory. It was reported this morning by Major Nelson, aka Larry Hryb of Microsoft, the company was dropping the retail price from $179.99 to $129.99 and that the drop was immediately effective in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
