Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2001 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Microsoft
• Released on: 2006-12-01
• Rating: To Be Announced
• Platform: Xbox 360

Computeractive
just as good - if not better than - the £1,000 dedicated Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray player

Manufacturer's Description
The Xbox 360 HD DVD Player offers Xbox 360 owners the most affordable way to jump into the next generation of DVD technology and experience HD DVD when they are ready. Just add Xbox 360 HD DVD Player to Xbox 360 for the ultimate home-theatre experience with more clarity and detail than high-definition TV (HDTV) content via broadcast, cable or satellite.

Customer Reviews

come on jump in and enjoy the movie!
I too just made the upgrade to the HD DVD drive for the xbox 360.

Setting this up seems pretty straight forward and yes your xbox 360 needs to have connection to the internet so that it can download some updates. This won't take long.

The package and features include:
External HD DVD drive
Remote Controller and batteries
The HD DVD drive has 2 extra USB ports
installation disc and manual
Cable to connect HD DVD drive to the back of your 360
Requires its own power supply but thankfully its a lot smaller than the brick that you need for the 360.

Picture quality is great, again, as other reviewers have stated you will not really notice that much of a difference between the HD DVD's and standard DVDs but to be honest to really notice the improved detail quality, hook it up to a huge projector or massive 40+ in" LCD/Plasma TV and then play your old standard dvds on it and then say you can't notice any difference!

Also it might help if you change the resolution settings on your xbox 360 display (ie 720P, 1080i and 1080P if your TV supports these resolutions) plus use either component/VGA/HDMI cable instead of the composite (ie red/white and yellow connectors) These will give you a much noticable difference. But again what cable you can use will depend on what connections your TV/monitor can accept.

Another great thing about the HD DVD drive is that all HD DVD's are region free so you can play Asian, Japanese, USA, UK and European HD DVD movies in your HD DVD drive (This does NOT apply to standard DVDs). I recently purchased a HD DVD that had quite a lot of scratches and it played fine Plus you can hook the external HD DVD drive to your pc and watch movies on there (provided your pc is powerful enough to do that)..

One last thing is that the external drive is quiet and don't heat up to crazy temperatues during operation, and after watching HD DVD's and other standard DVDs, taking them out of the drive and feeling how cool they are to the touch is assuring.

PC Compatible
Just a thought...since it has USB leads, I've tried to run it through the PC to watch Hot Fuzz & it worked!!! It recognised it straight away and was up and running in no time. So if you want you can bypass the 360 and use it on the computer instead.

Have I bought a Betamax??
Got the HD player for Christmas and I am really delighted with the quality of picture/sound that it gives out. For the price you really cannot beat it, the player also upscales normal DVD's so all my DVD's HD or not look great!
I also took adavantage of the 5 free HD DVD's from Microsoft which is superb, 5 free DVD's for nothing so that made the whole deal even better.

The only dark cloud on the Horizon is that Toshiba are no longer going to support this format, which means that the Xbox 360 is shortly going to be the only way that you can view HD DVD's. How many movie companies will produce HD films on this basis?? I doubt very few if any. It seems that Blue Ray is going to win out.

The only way that I can see this format being saved is if the coming Xbox 360 Ultimate has the HD player bulit in (as rumoured) and there are massive sales resulting in a demand for the HD format and other HD players.
Unfortunately I think it is unlikely. So in short its a great player but you may have nothing new to play on it before long!!