DVD Capable Wiis Coming Soon?

Many Nintendo fans were disappointed when Nintendo recently announced that the Wii would not ship with DVD playing capabilities. The fact that the GameCube shipped without the ability to play DVDs is generally seen as one of the reasons for the console’s poor sales compaired to that of the DVD spinning Xbox and Playstation 2.

However, the Wii may shortly be avaliable in a DVD compatable flavour, in Japan at any rate.

Gamesutra are today reporting that an American company called Sonic Solutions has been contracted to manafacture a Mark II Wii, with DVD playback for sale in the latter half of 2007. It is unknown how successful this system will be, given the poor performance of the DVD capable GameCube varient, the Panasonic Q.

Xbox 360 HD Drive Dissected

The Xbox 360 HD Drive lauch is still 4 days away but it’s already been dissected by those worthy chaps over at UNEASYsilence. Given that the HD Drive looks about the same as a standard DVD drive when it’s outside of it’s enclosure, it’s not that interesting, but the connectivity available to drive has turned a few heads.

First of all, the HD Drive is hooked up to your 360 by a standard USB port. Given that, it’s a logical step to plug it into a PC to see just how compatible it is. And it works, as long as you have a reasonably powerful rig and the correct drivers.

Not content with a cheap HD Drive for their PC, the guys at UNEASYsilence then hooked it up to an iMac, where it was immediately recognized by OS X. Unfortunately, Apple has yet to release an HD upgrade for DVDPlayer, but the drive still allowed standard definition DVDs to be played.

Given that the HD-DVD drive retails for £129 in the UK, while the Toshiaba A1 HD-DVD player retails for £589 on Amazon.co.uk, Microsoft seem to have provided videophiles with a cheap alternative to buying a full HD-DVD drive.