I read on a forum that many people have succedeed in using a $179 Xbox 360 HD DVD kit on a PC running Windows Vista or Windows XP, so I decided to give it a go – and it was basically just plug and play. Check it out inside.

I got myself a standard $179 Xbox 360 HD DVD kit.

Here’s how it look in case you haven’t seen it. Looks quite nice although it’s a bit big.

I placed the HD DVD drive on top of my HTPC and plugged it in via the USB cable that came with the kit.

My Windows Vista immediately found the new hardware and started the automatic installation routine.

And this was quite a surprise for me – my Vista connected to Windows update and immediately found the appropriate drivers and started downloading them. This was a near Apple experience

In a minute or two my new HD DVD drive was ready to use! Amazingly simple.

I did a right click on the drive inside Vista and choose ‘eject‘ – it ejected immediately. As I have Cyberlink PowerDVD installed on my machine, I decided to just try loading the drive with a HD DVD movie.

It recognized the high definition disc and started PowerDVD automatically. It prompted for an update, so I went for a small (well a 70MB upgrade aint that small, but it was a pretty quick download anyway). After the application had upgraded it restarted and started playing the movie.

I must say that I was a little surprised that it was so easy to get it going. Sure, I have a pretty decent HTPC computer with a HDCP compatible graphic card but anyway it was Easy spelled with a capital E.

And yes, the picture quality is stunning! So if you have an existing HTPC setup and want a cheap high definition source, go get a Xbox 360 HD DVD kit! Worth every $.