Lee McKusick

It seems the format wars have been won.

Toshiba has announced that they will cease production of HD-DVD devices. After Wal-Mart said Friday that they would be going Blu-ray exclusive, among the other HD-DVD setback recently, i.e. Warner Bros., it seemed inevitable.

I wonder how long it’ll take for the XBox 360 to get a Blu-Ray drive?

For those of you who want HD content on for a PC, or use a PC as a media machine, here’s a combo HD-DVD/Bluu-ray drive for $229 from Newegg: LG GGC-H20L.

Here’s TekZillka’s review:

The LG GGC-H20L is a combo format Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drive for your PC. It lists for $299 online. While the drive does not support burning of either HD disc format it will support the following (taken from the NewEgg website)

LG Black 16X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 4X DVD+R DL 16X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 5X DVD-RAM DVD-ROM: 16X Blu-ray DVD-ROM: 6X HD DVD-ROM: 3X DVD-ROM 40X CD-R 24X CD-RW 4MB Cache SATA Blu-ray/HD DVD-ROM & 16X DVD±R DVD

Basically everything you’re standard dual-layer DVD burner will. The primary reason to own one of course the ability to play both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats. However, you’ll still the software component which in Pat’s case was provided by CyberLink. The one that ships with the drive is a limited version so you digital audio output options are a bit sparse. You’ll need to be running XP w/ SP2 or Vista installed on a machine with at least a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 X2 3800+ , of course the more the better. Unfortunately there is no OS X Blu-Ray/HD-DVD that we know of. Other issues include HDCP support. You’ll need to have a video card that supports HDCP if you’re running non analog VGA. Although Pat’s 8300 card, non HDCP ready, still managed to play our the video. Finally some movies won’t play correctly do to the lack of support for Blu-Ray profile 1.1 support by CyberLink for the playback software. When this is released this problem should be rectified, we hope.