Will Nextbox have a Blu-Ray drive?

[slowmo]

pezus said:

slowmo said:
It will use Bluray.

HD-DVD wasn't supported by Microsoft, it simply used their codecs and I'm guessing the 360 HD-DVD drive was built as they didn't have to pay expensive royalties and the drives were cheaper to manufacture. It may also be that they wouldn't be allowed to use Bluray without having HDCP which wasn't available on the original non HDMI model 360's.

The reason they will have the Bluray drive next gen is the disks are far more resilient, they'll want to further push into the media centre market and finally the faster speed of modern Bluray drives make them a sensible format to choose now.

On August 22, 2005, the Blu-ray Disc Association and DVD Forum announced that the negotiations to unify their standards had failed.^[17] Rumors surfaced that talks had stalled; publicly, the same reasons of physical format incompatibility were cited.^[15][18] By the end of September that year, Microsoft and Intel jointly announced their support for HD DVD.

My history was fogged but it appears their support included supporting their own codecs that were used in HD-DVD natively in Windows Vista and also producing a addon for the 360.  They also provided not only the codecs but the interactive menu software.  I guess my idea of support is pumping money into the format but in literal terms they did support HD-DVD.  I would add they also had their VC-1 codec written into Bluray specifications too although it has subsequently been rejected by most companies due to it's closed nature in favour of open source solutions that can be used to produce mobile versions too for example.