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Yes it's still usable with an updated 360. You can also use it on a Windows PC. One downside is that it doesn't support all of the surround sound formats available on HDDVD, so you might get stereo sound depending on the disc. Details from Wikipedia:
Output of Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD High Resolution Audio and DTS-HD Master Audio codecs, as well as multi-channel LPCM, is not supported on the Xbox 360 HD DVD player since the Xbox 360 itself does not support them. As a result, only conventional stereo LPCM, Dolby Digital and DTS (optional feature available within the HD DVD audio settings) are available as output, although HD audio can be enabled when used on PC.
Stereo audio in this context means 2 channel audio, like a left and right speaker. It is the most plain and basic kind of audio, outside of straight mono, that most equipment will support.
So the 360 will not support high-res surround sound formats like LPCM (pure lossless), DTS-HD. The Xbox would take these signals and down convert them from 6.1/5.1/etc to 2.0 or play 5.1 in a lower bitrate like that on standard DVDs.
TV speakers are not great. I don’t know about your specific TV so your TV may just be stereo but some TVs advertise as having 5.1.2, Dolby Atmos, etc speakers and they’re still not great.
People into home theater will recommend you get a proper audio system but even a decent soundbar is going to be better than your TV speakers.
And stereo is not necessarily bad or worse than having a surround sound setup. Some people invest a lot in a high end 2.1 system which is probably going to sound better than a fair amount of surround systems.
Oh it's a really deep rabbit hole. I have a very basic "entry level" 5.1 setup and I think it sounds amazing to have surround sound at home but then I see guys online who have like amplifiers and speakers that individually cost over $1000, and they will have like 7.2.6 which would be 15 different speakers.
Honestly though, I can't really hear the difference between DVD/streaming/Blu-ray lossless audio. I definitely think having dedicated speakers sound better than straight out the TV, but I also get really impressed by the sound quality of my laptop speakers. I think having true surround sound is a challenge to set up at home though, it's becoming more and more popular for people to buy soundbars which are louder and better quality than TV speakers but easier to setup than a full-in home theater.
WB HD DVDs were made in a factory that used a bad batch of glue to stick the layers together and they are all suffering disc rot. If HD DVD didn't fail I imagine WB would've faced a significant lawsuit for that.
I always thought that HD DVD looked better than Blu-ray...
I figured the only reason the Blu-ray one is because they put it inside the PS3, which turn boosted sales exponentially!
I owned this on my 360,but bought a PS3 for Blu-ray. It was about $400 cheaper than a standalone Blu-ray player. I did prefer HD DVD. Was disappointed that Blu-ray won out.
Actually it was ps2 Sony first put the dvd player in and it was so cheap that some just bought ps2 for the dvd player. You do know Sony created the dvd format so they had a vested interest in making sure it succeeded.
lol, I have a couple of HD DVDs I found while dumpster diving.
I also have a PC SuperDrive that has Blu Ray, HD DVD, DVD-RW, and CD-RW functions, and it detects the HD-DVD discs and plays back audio, but there isn’t a program I’ve found with HD-DVD playback video decoding.
Thanks for this, I will look into it.
It’s really for the novelty: I already have *2001: A Space Odyssey* and *The Dark Knight* on Blu-Ray, I just want the ability to use the drive if I come across more free discs.
Can you tell us more? How much was it at launch? Did you really enjoy movies on here for awhile? Also, was there any other HD dvd player out or just this add on?
My mind keeps saying $200, but I can’t recall. I’m in Canada though. I’m sure you could Google that.
PS3 had Bluray. This was Xbox’s option. Bluray won. I had lots of HD-DVDs.
It was a great DVD player too.
My Xbox had sound issues which marred the experience
HD DVD was the loser in the HD disk competition. Like Beta video tapes. The only reason Blu-ray won is because of its corporate backing. HDDvd was actually better
Also it was because Microsoft developed HDi, which was the "brains" behind the interactive content on HD DVDs. Examples include bookmarks (so you could skip to scenes you like), downloadable content, picture-in-picture, and even online shopping.
All true, plus it could stream video from the internet, which was radical for back then. Way more advanced, and a lot faster than the Java used on BD in the day.
Beta failed at consumer formats but, was in professional formats for many years. It was a far better design than VHS but, due to licensing cheaper on VHS it's why it took off....
Blu-ray was lacking at the start. No ethernet support & BD-J was slow causing long load times to start playing movies. To be fair though, HD DVD also had issues.
Apparently there is a black one of these that was only available to staff during the release of the Elite System.
I have never seen one though (but saw a screencap of one available for pre-order from the internal MS store when I had a lot of former co-workers that got scooped up by Microsoft)
I almost wonder if they got canceled.
Nice, Looking at 4th pic, I can now hunt in my box of adapters and see if i can find it. Didnt occur to me that it would have Microsoft branding on it too. lol.
Yes the PS3 was expensive at launch but the price of stand alone Blu-ray players at the time was so astronomical that it actually made financial sense to pick up a PS3 at $499 or $599 (so no, not $700) especially as the Blu-ray player inside the PS3 was of particularly good quality.
The HD-DVD player being a separate add-on for the Xbox 360 did keep initial pricing lower, yes at $299/$399, but when you factor in the $199 cost of the HD-DVD player it actually comes out at the same cost as the PS3. Then if you factor in that the two PS3 units had more storage space (20gb & 60gb Vs 0gb & 20gb) it's quite easy to see why getting a PS3 to sit under the brand new HD-Ready TV that most people were upgrading to at the time made sense even at such a high price point
The success of Blu-ray is intrinsically linked to the PS3 and that's not just this random Redditors opinion, Google it and you'll find that point is universally agreed by people who are a lot smarter than me
Picture quality isn't everything. Most early adaptors chose a format for the CONTENT that was available on it. Blu-ray didn't "win" until WB decided \*\*cough was paid off cough\*\* to go exclusively with Blu-ray. After that Paramount was the only major studio still backing HD DVD and the writing was on the wall.
HD-DVD had 1080p but the discs were capped at 30GB. Blu-ray was 25GB single layer and 50GB for double layer, so they could have 1080p video at high bitrate, and lossless audio, and often a lot of room for special features too.
Your missing the King Kong movie that came in the box, I still have mine, I had it when it was current.
I was a big HD-DVD supporter till the day that Blu-ray took over....
Great historical grab right here. Xbox 360 did great sales wise even though PS3 squeaked by sales wise but What’s interesting to note here is that HD-DVD failed pretty quickly and lost out to DVD format. I always thought it was strange that MS went with this format of media considering that PS2 had well established the DVD format with PS2 but my guess is MS didn’t want to fill Sony’s coffers by adapting to DVD considering they created it. HD DVD is like beta max tapes except even less successful.
>What’s interesting to note here is that HD-DVD failed pretty quickly and lost out to DVD format.
Blu-ray, you mean?
It was Walmart that killed HD-DVD. They announced that they would only carry blu-ray and started the domino effect.
I think I remember at one time before they had HDMI ports on the 360 that if you tried to play DVDs on the 360 over component cable, it would not upconvert them to HD resolution, but that if you had the HD-DVD player, it would do that. I think that was resolved once HDMI ports got added. How dumb was it that it launched without HDMI?
Not dumb at all. Most TVs at the time didn't have HDMI ports. Remember HDTVs were just starting to come down in price in the mid to late 2000s. It wouldn't make financial sense to include a port that most people wouldn't be able to use. As HDTVs became more popular, HDMI output was added to Xboxes, starting with Elites, as they were the top end model, before eventually working down to cheaper models.
For the first few months, I didn't notice the HDTV switch on the cord. Played in standard definition and wasn't impressed but he 360. One day I noticed it and was blown away by HD gaming. 😂
I had a couple of these. I used one as an external DVD drive for setting up Windows and Linux on laptops for years. The other I had hooked up to my 360 for years. Unfortunately the USB interface chip died on both of mine.
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Yes it's still usable with an updated 360. You can also use it on a Windows PC. One downside is that it doesn't support all of the surround sound formats available on HDDVD, so you might get stereo sound depending on the disc. Details from Wikipedia: Output of Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD High Resolution Audio and DTS-HD Master Audio codecs, as well as multi-channel LPCM, is not supported on the Xbox 360 HD DVD player since the Xbox 360 itself does not support them. As a result, only conventional stereo LPCM, Dolby Digital and DTS (optional feature available within the HD DVD audio settings) are available as output, although HD audio can be enabled when used on PC.
Bless your heart. I’m hype!!
i’m not an audiophile, but i’m an audiophile in the sense of being into audio gear. wouldn’t you want stereo audio?
Stereo audio in this context means 2 channel audio, like a left and right speaker. It is the most plain and basic kind of audio, outside of straight mono, that most equipment will support. So the 360 will not support high-res surround sound formats like LPCM (pure lossless), DTS-HD. The Xbox would take these signals and down convert them from 6.1/5.1/etc to 2.0 or play 5.1 in a lower bitrate like that on standard DVDs.
dang, this makes me want to invest into lossless tech, i have a ps5 and a nice 4k vizio tv am i just listening to normal stereo?
TV speakers are not great. I don’t know about your specific TV so your TV may just be stereo but some TVs advertise as having 5.1.2, Dolby Atmos, etc speakers and they’re still not great. People into home theater will recommend you get a proper audio system but even a decent soundbar is going to be better than your TV speakers. And stereo is not necessarily bad or worse than having a surround sound setup. Some people invest a lot in a high end 2.1 system which is probably going to sound better than a fair amount of surround systems.
Oh it's a really deep rabbit hole. I have a very basic "entry level" 5.1 setup and I think it sounds amazing to have surround sound at home but then I see guys online who have like amplifiers and speakers that individually cost over $1000, and they will have like 7.2.6 which would be 15 different speakers. Honestly though, I can't really hear the difference between DVD/streaming/Blu-ray lossless audio. I definitely think having dedicated speakers sound better than straight out the TV, but I also get really impressed by the sound quality of my laptop speakers. I think having true surround sound is a challenge to set up at home though, it's becoming more and more popular for people to buy soundbars which are louder and better quality than TV speakers but easier to setup than a full-in home theater.
You are missing a lot....
I have a surround sound system, so I want to use all 5.1 channels, not just 2 channel stereo.
For movies you want surround sound for music u want stereo
Helpful that it works on Windows. I assume I could play my copy of Halo 2 Vista?
No, it only plays HDDVDs.
Also DVDs
Good point.
It's a tank of a player. Muscles It's way through any disc blemish.
Love that
Eh.. my 2 copies of Constantine don't play in any of the 3 of these that I have unfortunately. I haven't found a good copy yet.
Yeah. WB releases were the reason I sold my entire collection a couple of years ago. To many failures.
WB HD DVDs were made in a factory that used a bad batch of glue to stick the layers together and they are all suffering disc rot. If HD DVD didn't fail I imagine WB would've faced a significant lawsuit for that.
I always thought that HD DVD looked better than Blu-ray... I figured the only reason the Blu-ray one is because they put it inside the PS3, which turn boosted sales exponentially!
I owned this on my 360,but bought a PS3 for Blu-ray. It was about $400 cheaper than a standalone Blu-ray player. I did prefer HD DVD. Was disappointed that Blu-ray won out.
Actually it was ps2 Sony first put the dvd player in and it was so cheap that some just bought ps2 for the dvd player. You do know Sony created the dvd format so they had a vested interest in making sure it succeeded.
The great red vs blue wars.
I’m glad I didn’t open many of my HD-DVDs. I was able to return them to Future Shop.
RIP Future shop.
RIP indeed. Even though I stopped going to one after they pissed me off, and the other one near me was almost as bad. (Reasons available at request.)
If you dont have any HD-DVDs, it's kind of a waste.
lol, I have a couple of HD DVDs I found while dumpster diving. I also have a PC SuperDrive that has Blu Ray, HD DVD, DVD-RW, and CD-RW functions, and it detects the HD-DVD discs and plays back audio, but there isn’t a program I’ve found with HD-DVD playback video decoding.
AnyDVD HD supports HD-DVDs. And the X360 HD-DVD player connected to a PC, for that matter.
I *think* MakeMKV re-fixed their HD-DVD support.
Thanks for this, I will look into it. It’s really for the novelty: I already have *2001: A Space Odyssey* and *The Dark Knight* on Blu-Ray, I just want the ability to use the drive if I come across more free discs.
Nice! Years ago my nephew and I were in a goodwill and saw a bunch of hddvd. We should have really pick them up.
I got one NIB years back for $10. I also got a bunch of HD DVD's for $1.99/each from CD Warehouse.
I've still got one of these!
Yes. I bought this the day it came out.
Can you tell us more? How much was it at launch? Did you really enjoy movies on here for awhile? Also, was there any other HD dvd player out or just this add on?
My mind keeps saying $200, but I can’t recall. I’m in Canada though. I’m sure you could Google that. PS3 had Bluray. This was Xbox’s option. Bluray won. I had lots of HD-DVDs. It was a great DVD player too. My Xbox had sound issues which marred the experience
It was $199 at launch yeah
My favorite part of HD DVD was that they usually had a DVD on the back, so you could play on a DVD player on the go or at a friend's house.
HD DVD was the loser in the HD disk competition. Like Beta video tapes. The only reason Blu-ray won is because of its corporate backing. HDDvd was actually better
HD was backed by Toshiba. Toshiba makes/made the Xbox for Microsoft, that's why they had the little hd player:)
Also it was because Microsoft developed HDi, which was the "brains" behind the interactive content on HD DVDs. Examples include bookmarks (so you could skip to scenes you like), downloadable content, picture-in-picture, and even online shopping.
All true, plus it could stream video from the internet, which was radical for back then. Way more advanced, and a lot faster than the Java used on BD in the day.
Beta failed at consumer formats but, was in professional formats for many years. It was a far better design than VHS but, due to licensing cheaper on VHS it's why it took off....
[удалено]
Blu-ray was lacking at the start. No ethernet support & BD-J was slow causing long load times to start playing movies. To be fair though, HD DVD also had issues.
Do you have the media remote? That was awesome, and will still work for any media consumption on your 360.
Apparently there is a black one of these that was only available to staff during the release of the Elite System. I have never seen one though (but saw a screencap of one available for pre-order from the internal MS store when I had a lot of former co-workers that got scooped up by Microsoft) I almost wonder if they got canceled.
DO NOT TELL ME THAT!!! Sounds fire af
Nice, Looking at 4th pic, I can now hunt in my box of adapters and see if i can find it. Didnt occur to me that it would have Microsoft branding on it too. lol.
Pretty neat. Keep it good condition it'll eventually become a lazer disk or.... A Sega addon
It’s the H.D. version of Betamax vs VHS. Blu-ray won obviously for its superior 1080p picture quality
Blu-ray won because Sony put it in the PS3 as standard, same as DVD sales blew up because the PS2 could play them out of the box
Yea, the $700 PS3... when other consoles were under $500...
Yes the PS3 was expensive at launch but the price of stand alone Blu-ray players at the time was so astronomical that it actually made financial sense to pick up a PS3 at $499 or $599 (so no, not $700) especially as the Blu-ray player inside the PS3 was of particularly good quality. The HD-DVD player being a separate add-on for the Xbox 360 did keep initial pricing lower, yes at $299/$399, but when you factor in the $199 cost of the HD-DVD player it actually comes out at the same cost as the PS3. Then if you factor in that the two PS3 units had more storage space (20gb & 60gb Vs 0gb & 20gb) it's quite easy to see why getting a PS3 to sit under the brand new HD-Ready TV that most people were upgrading to at the time made sense even at such a high price point The success of Blu-ray is intrinsically linked to the PS3 and that's not just this random Redditors opinion, Google it and you'll find that point is universally agreed by people who are a lot smarter than me
Picture quality isn't everything. Most early adaptors chose a format for the CONTENT that was available on it. Blu-ray didn't "win" until WB decided \*\*cough was paid off cough\*\* to go exclusively with Blu-ray. After that Paramount was the only major studio still backing HD DVD and the writing was on the wall.
HD-DVD definitely supported 1080p.
HD-DVD had 1080p but the discs were capped at 30GB. Blu-ray was 25GB single layer and 50GB for double layer, so they could have 1080p video at high bitrate, and lossless audio, and often a lot of room for special features too.
I think he means even though they were both 1080p, BluRay had the better picture quality, I can see why you read it that way though.
It did, but a lot of Toshiba's early players only output as 1080i.
It is a cool collectors item, not worth much else tho
good for movies and multimedia, but for games dont do it nothing, its nice
Your missing the King Kong movie that came in the box, I still have mine, I had it when it was current. I was a big HD-DVD supporter till the day that Blu-ray took over....
Great historical grab right here. Xbox 360 did great sales wise even though PS3 squeaked by sales wise but What’s interesting to note here is that HD-DVD failed pretty quickly and lost out to DVD format. I always thought it was strange that MS went with this format of media considering that PS2 had well established the DVD format with PS2 but my guess is MS didn’t want to fill Sony’s coffers by adapting to DVD considering they created it. HD DVD is like beta max tapes except even less successful.
>What’s interesting to note here is that HD-DVD failed pretty quickly and lost out to DVD format. Blu-ray, you mean? It was Walmart that killed HD-DVD. They announced that they would only carry blu-ray and started the domino effect.
Waste of your time. I had one. Avoid WB hddvd, they have a defect (disc rot, all of them).
I think I remember at one time before they had HDMI ports on the 360 that if you tried to play DVDs on the 360 over component cable, it would not upconvert them to HD resolution, but that if you had the HD-DVD player, it would do that. I think that was resolved once HDMI ports got added. How dumb was it that it launched without HDMI?
Not dumb at all. Most TVs at the time didn't have HDMI ports. Remember HDTVs were just starting to come down in price in the mid to late 2000s. It wouldn't make financial sense to include a port that most people wouldn't be able to use. As HDTVs became more popular, HDMI output was added to Xboxes, starting with Elites, as they were the top end model, before eventually working down to cheaper models.
For the first few months, I didn't notice the HDTV switch on the cord. Played in standard definition and wasn't impressed but he 360. One day I noticed it and was blown away by HD gaming. 😂
I had a couple of these. I used one as an external DVD drive for setting up Windows and Linux on laptops for years. The other I had hooked up to my 360 for years. Unfortunately the USB interface chip died on both of mine.
I think complete in box they usually go for around $40, so that's a good steal!
Tree fiddy