Are HD DVD PC players and burners coming soon?

October 17, 2006

With the upcoming $200 Xbox 360 external HD DVD player on the horizon, it got my curiosity going. I was interested in finding out about the value of such a PC style drive, as compared to a unit that was not subsidized by Microsoft and their games. I soon found out that the PC players were scarce and the only thing more scarce was PC HD DVD burners.

Well, it looks as though PC World has done some digging for us and this is what they have found so far.

Last month, Toshiba announced it would ship the slim-line drive it showed during the summer. Maciek Brzeski, vice president of marketing for the Toshiba Storage Device Division--which supplies the internal drive component to notebook manufacturers and to makers of external drives--expects to start shipping the slim-line drive by the end of the year: "We don't expect to see [the drives] in holiday [products], but certainly we expect to see them shipping in notebooks by late Q1 of next year."

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Blu-ray Disc burners have been shipping for months now--why is HD DVD taking so long to catch up? Chalk it up to a philosophical difference, not a technological one, says Brzeski. Toshiba, he says, views HD DVD more as a technology for delivering prepackaged (Hollywood) high-definition video, not for creating your own disc-based content. "I honestly don't believe in these early days that many people will be using HD DVDs and Blu-rays to back up content. If you look at the cost per GB to back up to disc, it's not cost-effective."

This is a good point I suppose, what good is recording capability if we really don't want to use it due to pricing concerns for the media? The article goes on to give some more tidbits of information as well. For instance, they mention a USB 2.0, external HD DVD ROM PC drive, that's coming from from former Blu-ray backer, HP in November. The HP hd100 will play back HD DVD-ROM, DVD-ROM, and audio CDs and can read DVD-RW discs. However, it will not have any burning capability for even DVD. Supplies will be limited for 2 to 3 months and it is going to make the Xbox unit look look a bargain according to the report.

This following link is to a PDF file from HP
concerning the hd100. The recommended specifications for a PC capable of utilizing this player are as follows: For a video card, you are going to need either a GeForce 7600GT or an ATI X1600, or something in that class of GPU. A powerful CPU is also needed: Such as a 3.2GHz Pentium, or a 2Ghz Core Duo or even an AMD Athlon 64 X 4200+ for example. It appears that it will come with CyberLink HD DVD playback software. I cannot find any pricing information as of yet.

Source: PC World