Making the 360 HD-DVD Drive PC-Compatible
Date: Monday, November 13 @ 16:54:54 UTC
Topic:
"Double Double toil and trouble, well more accurately it’s Torx 5 Torx 7 toil and lots trouble. Enticed by the $199 price, we set ourselves on a mission to find out if the Microsoft’s XBox 360 HD-DVD player could work on a normal PC. Now, this can’t be an easy task, can it?"
Source: http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/11/8303/
"Knowing there was already software available for Windows XP to play HD-DVD’s, could simply plugging the HD-DVD drive into a PC work? Well, no Windows needs drivers.
If Windows wants drivers, drivers it will get. After installing these drivers magic started to happen. The HD-DVD drive was now recognized in Windows XP. Now we needed a piece of software to actually play the HD-DVD. And after some hard work we managed to find a version of WinDVD 8 that was able to play an HD-DVD movie even on my low end hardware (Granted with some stuttering).
Not satisfied with that result and being a geeks that we are, we decided to crack open the external HD-DVD drive to find out the manufacturer, and model of the drive Microsoft was using (It’s a Toshiba HD-DVD OEM drive - by the way, pictures of the compete take apart are after the jump).
When we easily dissembled the beast, where we were encountered by the strangest plug on the back of the Toshiba OEM drive we have ever seen. Obviously, we can’t connect the HD-DVD drive directly into a tower computer, and must work with the USB case that Microsoft provided, so long as it works does it matter?
Then for a laugh, we decided to plug the drive into a Mac to see what would happen.
Interestingly, the MacOS automatically recognized the drive when we plugged it in, and when a DVD disc was inserted the “DVD Player” application included in the OS started doing its thing. Experimenting further and just for kicks, we decided to insert the HD-DVD. Again, as expected the HD-DVD wouldn’t play due to the fact that there is no player for the MacOS that supports that format.
Seems like Microsoft has unwilling created a cheap HD-DVD drive, for any Windows user.
Again, after the jump are pictures of the XBox 360’s HD-DVD drive being town apart".
***Please follow source for pictures of disassembly****
Source: http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/11/8303/
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