Hands-on with 360's HD DVD player

Reader Pete was lucky enough to attend a presentation that Microsoft and Toshiba were giving about their respective HD DVD players—Microsoft with a production sample Xbox 360 attachment and Toshiba with their HD-A2 and HD-XA2 second-generation HD DVD players.

Was he impressed? Can the Xbox 360 HD DVD attachment be used on a PC? When will these new Toshiba players launch? Jump on to find out.

We got to view some HD-DVDs discs that aren't out yet, and the picture quality was absolutely stunning. [redacted] made it clear that we couldn't discuss what titles we saw. These were 4th or 5th generation HD-DVD titles, and they really have the VC-1 encoding down to a science. They told us to keep the actual bit-rates secret, but they are only slightly higer than regular DVD bitrates which is astounding. (and we're talking about 1080p 24fps video here).

Onthexbox.com