When asked this question, the most common answer people come up with is a big resounding NO (or meh), mainly because you would need to be a brain surgeon or a copyright lawyer to be able to afford the Blu-ray\/HD DVD drive. But things may not be so bad – with a little bit of research, tweaking and black magic, you won’t need many many thousands of dollars to get Blu-ray\/HD DVD playback going on your PC – only a couple of thousand would do.<\/p>\n
First, read my Is your PC High Definition DVD Ready?<\/a> guide to familiarise yourself with what is needed to achieve Blu-ray\/HD DVD playback. Don’t be too shocked at the system requirements, it’s still early days for PC Blu-ray\/HD DVD, but if you’re lucky, you may only be a high definition reader drive away from watching 1080p movies in full resolution.<\/p>\n Assuming you’ve got a PC good enough for HD DVD playback, your cheapest option right now is to buy the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive for $199 (has been sold for less, plus with bonus movies) and use that as your HD DVD reader drive – even if you don’t have an Xbox 360! Yes, it really does work and it’s officially supported by Microsoft too. Read this guide<\/a> for full instructions. Of course, if you do have an Xbox 360, then the HD DVD add-on drive is an excellent way to introduce yourself to high definiton DVD (plus it works as a normal DVD drive too, so you can play DVD movies on it as opposed to using the built-in, disc-scratching drive on the Xbox 360).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When asked this question, the most common answer people come up with is a big resounding NO (or meh), mainly because you would need to be a brain surgeon or a copyright lawyer to be able to afford the Blu-ray\/HD DVD drive. But things may not be so bad – with a little bit of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-high_definition_dvd","category-xbox_360"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pzVMv-X","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}