We last talked about this thing here.
I managed to purchase the 'last' one at a local computer store (name withheld). I went to three places on Sat and got the same story.. they were released on Friday and either sold out that day or Sat morning. Somehow at the place I got mine one guy told me they were all sold out that morning. But another guy said, "hmmm, wait I think I saw one more in the back". I speculate that an employee had set one aside for himself, but forgot to let they other guys in on his little plan. Oh well, mine now.
Ok here is my mini review:
Yes this drive looks and feels like an afterthought hack. It is ugly and clunky, and somehow surprisingly heavy. But it seems to work very well. And is definitely the cheapest entry into HD Movies I could have made for the next 12 months at least.
The drive comes with a driver disc, one movie; King Kong, and a full 360 Media remote. You connect it to the 360 via USB cable. The cleanest way to do this is to use the rear USB connection. Ahh, but wait... what if you have the Wifi adapter connected- like I do? Well the 360 only has a single rear USB connection. I was momentarily frustrated by this until I realized that the back of the HD unit not only has a two port USB hub, but a docking port for the Wifi unit as well. So I moved the Wifi to the HD drive. Now while this was a clever work around to the problem, it only re-enforces my feeling that this was a hacked solution rather than something that was thought out from the start.
The other interesting thing is how they solved the integration with the dashboard. When you install the driver, it not only adds to codec etc, it also modifies the dashboards DVD graphical selection to be split into two halves - the upper for the DVD drive, and the lower for the HD drive. This way you can 'scroll' down with a controller and pick one or the other to play. The remote seems to control what ever drive is currently playing. This all works pretty good, except that when I hit eject on the remote it ejects the internal drive only. I have not found a way to get that button to work with the HD drive.
So how does it look? Well I'm not fully HD enabled at my house yet - I am still saving money for the 1080p LCD TV that I want, and my projector doesn't push enough pixels to really take advantage of this. But I do have at least 1 1080 capable device in my house - my 24" Wide Dell monitor. I connected it up to the 360 via VGA cable. I was pleasantly surprised that I could now choose 1920 x 1080 as a resolution thanks to the recent 360 software upgrade. My local video store was out of nearly every HD title they carry - something I have never seen before. I attribute that to the large number of MS employees that live in my town - many of which must have jumped on this drive as soon as I did. So the only content I had to try was the bundled King Kong title. I'm not really a big fan of this movie, but it is great at showing off the 1080p capabilities of the HD DVD format. On my monitor this movie looked simply amazing. It was crisp and smooth. You could make out all the detail of the landscape, you could see individual hairs on the actors etc. In short no noticeable pixelization at all. I could really tell the difference between HD and normal DVD on this monitor. I can't wait to get a larger screen going now.
Do you notice any lag with the Wi-Fi connector when playing on XBox Live?
Let me ask you that question: Do you notice that I have any lag when I'm playing with you on XBox live?
Nah, it runs very well. The only time it has ever given me problems was in streaming high bandwidth recorded shows from my media center server last summer. But I found later that my Wifi router was dying. Since I replaced it things have been pretty smooth. When I move my projector setup to its final location however, I'm going to hard wire it. As much as I like 802.11G, I don't think it's going to cut it for streaming HD content in the future.