When Microsoft announced the HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360, there was a lot of speculation whether the drive could be used on a regular PC. Now that the drive is starting to appear in stores, people have begun to experiment and confirm the speculation.
Dan at UNEASYsilence took one of the drives and connected it to his PC. After a bit of driver searching he was able to get it functioning relatively happily.
On an interesting note, Dan was also able to get OS X to recognize the drive. Unfortunately though, he couldn’t get it to play properly.
At any rate, with the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive working on PC, that means that users can now pickup a $199 drive and, with a little tweaking, get it running smoothly. Thanks Microsoft.
Hacking the XBox 360’s HD-DVD for the PC [UNEASYsilence]
It is not as simple to install an Xbox 360 HD-DVD to a PC as this article implies. If you have a Vista operating syste, however, one need not look for drivers; the drivers for the HD-DVD come loaded with the Vista OS. But viewing titles on a Windows PC–XP or Vista–requires a recent cpu (a dual core cpu) and a fast video card, too, and a software program to view the title. Cyberlinks PowerDVD Ultra works, but it costs $99. For the typical Windows user this means spending another $300 to $400 before their PC can handle the HD-DVD files. I am running an AMD dual core 4200 with a ATI X1900 Pro graphics card. I had to purchase AnyDVD decryption software to make backup copies of my HD-DVDs ($30); the software places your HD files on the hard drive–so you’d better have plenty of storage space–and then buy the aforementioned Graphics card ($230), and purchase PowerDVD Ultra ($99), which has a few bugs in it but performs adequately.
So, the X-Box 360 Hd-DVD drive does work on a Windows PC, but the expense of the DVD drive is only the beginning!