SlackthePlanet

Thats right FOR THE WIN! I know that sounds unbelievably stupid to most of you considering its the digital equivalent of an evolutionary dead end. Whats going to sound even more strange is I didn’t buy a player until I was positive the format was good and dead. I waited patiently for Toshiba to sign the death certificate and then and only then I jumped on it like a necrophiliac in a morgue.

I had been watching the xbox360 add-on HD-DVD drive for quite some time. I watched it spiral in price for a while before making the jump:

• $200 “NAH!”
• $170 “Hmmm, very interesting”
• $80 “Oh my gosh it’s so close I can taste it”
• $50 “BINGO!!!”

So there I was walking out of Best Buy carrying an HD player that I paid a grand total of $30 for, thanks to my Reward Zone coupons. What did I do next? Headed straight for Hollywood Video. I was just going in to rent some HD movies but they were running a 2 for $20 sale on all HD-DVDs. So I ended up walking out of there with quite the collection.

The really great thing about Microsoft’s little add-on drive is that it can connect to a computer. Here is where the WIN part of my outlandish HD-DVD FTW statement came from. I buy the HD-DVDs for cheap, some are as low as $9 online now. I rip them to my computer using the add-on drive. I can view them here on my computer or stream them through my network. Now I just wait until Blu-Ray burners drop in price. Once they do then I burn my ripped copies back to disk, this time its a Blu-Ray and I avoid having to re-buy my collection of HD movies.