They are $20 anywhere iv seen them selling them, you have been had my boy!

I have both a standalone and the add-on. The standalone takes forever to load. The 360 add-on is already online if you are online with LIVE. Plus, I can get messages from my buds. It's a great price and yeah, no movies are coming out, but you can see some sweet HD movies that will eventually come to Blu Ray ... but they aren't there yet. Plus, the extra features, the integrated Web features. Awesome pickup.

I give your purchase a 9.9 and your scoring at perfect 10. Nancy, you rock!!!!

Tell us the terrible news...............

I'm sure ProfCrab will give it a 9.2. ;) 

i dunno why people keep telling him HD DVD is dead, he knows that, hence making the post in the first place. the point is for $40 he can buy into a dead format and buy the reasonable catalogue of HD DVDs very cheaply. For the price of say 3 Bluray disks you can have 10 HD DVDs and once BD prices drop, then buy into it.

The only problem i have with this is when the HD DVD drive packs up, which it inevitably will, all those disks will be useless.

Can you show me the Web site that states the HD DVDs will implode after a certain period of them? HD DVD and Blu Ray are visually identical. They are both 1080p and the only real difference is the storage capacity. That's it.

He can buy a grip of HD DVD movies that look stunning. I actually bought HD DVD movies over Blus unless I have no choice. And even then, I'll buy them on sale.

Useless? Not really. It can still play disks, DVDs and HD DVDs, and even music CDs. The disks are functional long after the drive is gone. And the chance to get HD movies on the cheap never goes out of style.

It will be YEARS before the average techie can get HD movies and a player under $100. As the OP stated, it can play movies and upscales them as well.

A killer deal. I may buy another or two just to have around in case my drive goes out.

You are unlikly to ever burn out a console dvd or HD-DVD or Blu-ray drive playing movies.

Games however require fast load times and run the DVD at high speed to do it typically over 10X normal pace and thus cause more vibration , more wear and work the components harder, as they constantly hunt tracks speed up and slow down during game play.

Movies only need to read at a lesurely 1* or 1.5* the drive only needs to spin slowly for movies and does not need to hunt tracks so you are very unlikley ever to have problems playing movies.

One advantage of the Blu-ray for games is it can transfer more data at lower RPM than DVD can so generally the drive does not need to spin as fast (well current PS3 drive is only Blu-ray X2 speed anyway !).

I found this info here
http://www.answers.com/topic/optical-disc-drive?cat=technology
"For DVD base speed, or "1x speed", is 1.385 MB/s, equal to 1.32 MiB/s, approximately 9 times faster than CD's base speed of 200-500rpm. For HD DVD drive base speed is 4,57 MB/s, equal to 4,36 MiB/s. For Blu-ray drive base speed is 6,74 MB/s, equal to 6,43 MiB/s."

I think Blu-ray and Hd-DVD base speed is probably around ~2.5 X DVD base speed
A 12*DVD is spinning at similar rate to a 4.5* Blu-ray drive.
This explains why the 360's drive at 12*DVD speed is actually not much faster than the PS3's far slower spinning 2* blu-ray drive (which is spinning at similar RPM's to a 6*DVD).

Good choice. Now you can get alot of HD DVD movies at bargain basement prices. Me personally I am almost glad HD DVD lost as I now have way way more movies than I would ever have had if the war was still on. And when there are no more HD DVD movies to buy I will be left with one heck of a quality upscaling DVD player.

Lol.

HD-DVD is dead: long live HD-DVD! Long may the second-hand market prosper...Long live CH-DVD!