Microsoft's HD DVD Sidecar For The Xbox 360 Due For 20006 Holiday Season
By Shane C. Buettner May 18, 2006 — The amount of news relevant to home theater enthusiasts that came from last week's E3 gaming trade show is striking evidence that whether we want it or not, some form of convergence is happening. As UAV reported earlier , Sony announced pricing and availability for its eagerly anticipated PlayStation3 gaming console, and Microsoft followed suit in its own way by announcing that its HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360 will be available in time for Christmas this year. Although no pricing or dates are yet established, the rumors are flying.

The first group of reports flying around put the price of the add-on drive at $199, which together with the Xbox 360 console itself would make the pricing of the package virtually identical to the premium 60GB version of Sony's Blu-ray Disc based PS3at $600. That lasted about half a day, and then the new rumors started with the idea that Microsoft will eat money if it has to in order to keep its package cheaper than the premium PS3.

More interesting than that is what is actually known at this time about the HD DVD add-on. It will connect to the Xbox 360 via USB, and according to Microsoft "harness the power of the Xbox 360 console for the HD video outputs and digital surround sound." The significant thing about this is that the Xbox 360 is not currently outfitted with an HDMI output, and on the audio front it supports only toslink optical digital audio and analog stereo. This places serious limitations on the Xbox 360 combo as an HD DVD source for a home theater.

Its component output is limited to 1080i, and with no HDMI there is no option for sending the video signals to the display in the digital domain, which is most often superior to analog connections, and there is no way a user will ever pull the native 1080p signals off of an HD DVD disc. On the audio front, with only toslink optical and analog stereo, Xbox 360 users will be stuck playing back legacy Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks at best. There are no provisions for hi-res multichannel PCM or any of the new higher bitrate codecs from Dolby or DTS.

Sony's $600 PlayStation3 will offer 1080p output and hi-res multichannel linear PCM via HDMI.