Hi! Def.

I broke down and bought an HDDVD player. I bought the Xbox360 HDDVD drive for 199$ canadian which is a decadent price. It’s an external drive (which actually houses an internal drive), and it uses USB2 (although boo to Microsoft for NOT powering the drive over usb, instead you have another cord), and it acts as a mini usb hub as well, giving you two more usb ports on its back.

I do not own an Xbox 360. But I do own a computer. Lucky me. Plug in the drive to my MacBook Pro and the drive shows up in the System Profiler. Unfortunately Mac OS X currently does not support UDF 2.5 (the HDDVD filesystem) nor does it have any software players that will decode commercial HDDVDs (I may be wrong on the former, though). I already knew this before I bought the player, so I wasn’t too let down. That meant, however, that it was time to install Windows on my Mac ( a little bit of me died ).

The original plan was to instal Windows on an external drive, but apparently Windows doesn’t allow this (well, it does, but its a gross hack…that requires Windows in the first place :\ ). So now I have Windows on a 5gb partition on my MacBook Pro. Now, on to the actual movies.

It came with King Kong (which I’ve yet to watch) and I also bought Batman Begins. I have to say that even though I’m not running a full HD setup yet (my monitor is 1440×900) it still looks amazing. Check out the HD trailers in Quicktime and you’ll get the idea. It’s stunning. I know HDDVD might not “win” the format war, but at that price, you can’t go wrong!