Using an Xbox 360 HD-DVD Drive on a PC

How to connect the drive to your computer for HD movie playback

When Microsoft launched its Xbox 360 HD DVD Drive at the beginning of December for £130, it was by far the cheapest drive with a blue laser to read high definition discs.

Although designed to work with an Xbox 360 games console, we wanted to get the HD DVD Drive working on a PC.

The drive is made by Toshiba and uses a very standard Universal Disk Format (UDF) file system. After a bit of hunting around and some tweaking we finally managed to get HD DVDs playing on a range of PC hardware.

The Xbox 360 HD DVD has a mini USB 2.0 port that connects to the Xbox 360. The cable used is the same type that most digital cameras use and one is included in the box.

After connecting the drive to a USB 2.0 port on your computer, the Windows XP hardware wizard will pop up. Close this and download the 2.5MB Toshiba driver instead.

Extract the driver using winrar and then right click on thdudf.inf and select install. Once installed reboot your computer. If you're an early bird using Windows Vista you don't need to install a driver.

Ignore all requests to install the USB memory device, since this cannot be installed and has no relevance to HD DVD playback.

You now have full access to the files on an HD DVD. While it ran HD DVDs fine, out of curiosity we put a standard ordinary DVD into the drive, but as expected, it failed to read it. This is because the driver is udf 2.5 and DVD's use a 1.5 file system as standard.

Getting hold of playback software was the tricky bit, since neither Cyberlink nor InterVideo sold retail software supporting Blu-ray or HD DVD at the time of writing.

Cyberlink provided us with an original equipment manufacturer version of PowerDVD 6.5 for HD DVD use (OEM means it comes bundled with drives and can't be bought in the shops). However, all is not lost because Cyberlink informed us PowerDVD 7 Ultra will be released later this week. It should be the first retail software to support Blu-ray and HD DVD playback out of the box.

The resulting video quality will depend on how your PC is setup. Cyberlink offers a free program for download called CyberLink BD/HD DVD Advisor, which will show you how ready your system is. The software is only in beta form and in our experience you don't need as fast a processor as Cyberlink recommends.

Our test system used a Pentium D 3.2GHz with 2GB of memory and an Nvidia 7900GT graphics card. We also successfully used an Nvidia 7600GT and an ATI x1600Pro graphics card.

In the first instance we used an Nvidia 7950GT and the latest Nvidia driver at the time of writing (93.71). This driver offers some hardware decoding which removes some of the burden from the processor.

When using a VGA cable the picture looked fantastic. Cyberlink claims PowerDVD 6.5 does not downscale the video over a VGA connection and only applies Macrovision to the analogue signal to avoid copying.

The picture certainly looked high definition but we have no way of quantifying what we were seeing since PowerDVD disables print screen software and the inbuilt video properties option, making thorough analysis tough.

Even when we watched the video at a resolution of 1024x576 (which is what PowerDVD automatically resizes to when you play the HD DVD film), the video is still far sharper and more vivid than a DVD, thanks to the superior VC-1 codec used in our test film, King Kong.

When using the Nvidia card and DVI output, the movie played for two seconds before turning off, complaining there was no High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) on the digital signal. This was because the card didn't have an HDCP silicon image chip on it.

We then switched to an ATI graphics card, a prototype of the PowerColor x1600Pro with an HDMI output and full HDCP compatibility.

Although ATI drivers don't currently accelerate decoding like Nvidia's do, we were at least getting a digital picture. We were unable to confirm a high resolution result (720p or 1080i/p) and this is something we will further test in PowerDVD Ultra in the new year.

As if the high definition wars between Blu-ray and HD DVD weren't enough to confuse customers, there are far more issues to deal with.

If anything, chosing the analogue VGA output instead of a digital output is the simplest option to connect your PC to your high definition TV. As you can read from our blog, you shouldn't suffer if using an analogue connection until 2010 at the earliest.

Although this experiment was more of a proof of concept guide than a conclusive how to, PC users now have an affordable high definition route through the Xbox 360 HD-DVD.

This DIY option isn't suitable for everyone, especially since you need a reasonably powerful PC. The lack of playback software is still the biggest problem but new packages lie just around the corner.

Which means if you do own an Xbox 360 and plan to buy the HD DVD Drive, you now know how to also connect it to your PC should you wish.