According to
The Register, the drive will be available for Christmas.
Does anyone else feel that if the drive was going to have HDMI and support copy-protected output, MS would have something to say about that in order to end all of the speculation? After all, this is potentially something that they can laud over Sony.
The fact that they are keeping very quiet about this, and pricing, suggests to me that they haven't (yet) got anything good to say about either point.
So, to turn around a question that Jeremy asks on another front-page posting, if you had a choice between a games console with an HD-DVD drive and no HDMI support, and a games console with a Blu-Ray drive with HDMI, which would you pick?
Or is it going to come down to the games, shock horror, and not movie playback?
--Philip