Driver extract allows HD-DVD drive to be used on Windows XP

Perhaps HD-DVD Emergence Day emerges twice – but for reasons not covered in Microsoft‘s End User License Agreement (EULA). On the same day as Microsoft unveiled the HD-DVD addon for the Xbox 360, BluePrint found a way to make the add-on work on a Windows XP PC.

Xbox-Scene reports on the “XBOX360 HD-DVDRom UDF Reader v2.5 Windows XP BluePrint”. It’s essentially the Toshiba driver used in their first generation of HD-DVDs, and which allows the PC to communicate with the HD-DVD reader. These are unmodified by BluePrint, as they didn’t create them themselves, and there are some issues with “there (sic) availability… limited to specific machines which were (sic) familiar with from our places of business”.

The drivers mean that PCs can now read HD-DVDs as HD-DVDs, using the Xbox 360 add-on. Which means, says BluePrint, you can copy the contents of the HD-DVD into your PC. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. This isn’t a clear-cut rip of the HD-DVD movie for starters (“you will not be directly copying any hd-dvd’s as of yet” due to the dual-layer, 30GB format of HD-DVDs), and second, Xbox-Scene ain’t hosting the drivers as they could be a violation of the EULA, and for that neither are we.

Perhaps HD-DVD Emergence Day emerges twice – but for reasons not covered in Microsoft‘s End User License Agreement (EULA). On the same day as Microsoft unveiled the HD-DVD addon for the Xbox 360, BluePrint found a way to make the add-on work on a Windows XP PC.

Xbox-Scene reports on the “XBOX360 HD-DVDRom UDF Reader v2.5 Windows XP BluePrint”. It’s essentially the Toshiba driver used in their first generation of HD-DVDs, and which allows the PC to communicate with the HD-DVD reader. These are unmodified by BluePrint, as they didn’t create them themselves, and there are some issues with “there (sic) availability… limited to specific machines which were (sic) familiar with from our places of business”.

The drivers mean that PCs can now read HD-DVDs as HD-DVDs, using the Xbox 360 add-on. Which means, says BluePrint, you can copy the contents of the HD-DVD into your PC. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. This isn’t a clear-cut rip of the HD-DVD movie for starters (“you will not be directly copying any hd-dvd’s as of yet” due to the dual-layer, 30GB format of HD-DVDs), and second, Xbox-Scene ain’t hosting the drivers as they could be a violation of the EULA, and for that neither are we.