Xbox 360's HD-DVD Upgrade: Official

External add-on will offer HD movie content to rival PS3's BluRay playback, due later this year.

The Xbox 360 has been out for barely a month - and that's if you could find one - but already Microsoft has announced a vital new add-on device for the machine, due for release later this year.

An External HD-DVD Drive upgrade was unveiled by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, flanked by Xbox 360 marketing boss Peter Moore, at his tenth annual keynote speech at CES, a massive electronics show in Las Vegas each year. The new drive will offer Xbox 360 owners with the ability to watch the next-generation movie format, HD-DVD. It's like a DVD but with far greater storage capacity and increased play speed, enabling a much higher better "high definition" picture that Xbox 360 games already utilise.

Moore revealed that "millions of Xbox 360 owners can pop in an HD DVD disk and enjoy high definition movie playback."

However, it's a widely recognised inevitability that the HD-DVD format will have to battle it out with the other rival DVD successor, BluRay, championed by Sony. Sony announced last year that PlayStation 3 will feature a BluRay built-in, making the "VHS versus Betamax" style battle between the two formats significantly more charged.

But Microsoft is very keen to emphasize the "here and now", and just as Xbox 360 was the first of the so-called next generation consoles to launch, so it hopes HD-DVD will spearhead early adoption of the new format. It even claims Xbox 360 has driven forward the adoption of high definition TVs in the first place, saying that nine out of 10 Xbox 360 owners currently own or intend to purchase a HDTV.

The big question right now is whether or not the powerful new drive will be just for watching next-gen DVD content, or whether games will make use of the format too - alienating any gamer that wants supposed HD-DVD games but doesn't have the upgrade. As well as offering far greater capacity (30GB, above DVD's maximum size of around 9GB) developers may be able to make use of the new format for games in other ways. But HD-DVD and BluRay discs are currently far more expensive than good old DVD, so some questions are still left unanswered. All Microsoft has committed to is that the device will provide "even more choices for experiencing high-definition content, in either physical or digital form." Content, of course, could include games.

It is thought that Microsoft will release the HD-DVD upgrade - which some have jokingly likened to Sega's ill-fated CD add-on for its cartridge-based MegaDrive console in the 1990s - with tempting hardware and software bundles to lure gamers away from PlayStation 3, also widely expected later this year.

Gates also focused heavily on the new Windows Vista operating system during his Las Vegas appearance, which much like Windows XP Media Centre Edition, will also benefit Xbox 360 users who want to stream video and music from their PC.

Peter Moore underlined: "The HD era has begun and the Xbox 360 is leading the way."

Kikizo Staff