LG's hybrid Blu-ray/HD DVD standalone drive coming soon

Not to be outdone with just a combination set-top Blu-ray/HD DVD player, LG has also announced the GGW-H10N combo standalone drive for computers. The drive -- which presumably incorporates the same Broadcom integrated chipset as the BH100 -- can read both blue-laser formats, but only writes to Blu-ray or standard DVDs and CDs. According to the LG press event from Sunday, the PC drive will support all iHD functionality for HD DVD titles, whereas the set-top box will not due to hardware limitations. The SATA drive is set to be released before the end of January for $1200.

[Thanks, Khattab]

[wookiewarrior @ Jan 9th 2007 12:49PM]

The drive probably won't have a Broadcom chipset as a) they don't make them for optical drives and b) all the decoding and whatnot is performed by the PC itself.

[Chuckles McGee @ Jan 10th 2007 12:47PM]

Let's play the "Shove as many format icons on the front panel of a player as possible" game. Oh! No USB 2.0, Bluetooth or SD! LG loses!

[Russell @ Jan 9th 2007 1:44PM]

For a tech blog Engadget editors sure seem to ride the short bus.

Of course it doesn't have a broadcom decoding chip and it's obvious that software is the decoder and the reason for full iHD support, it's not reliant on the drive.

[simon.vivera @ Jan 10th 2007 11:16AM]

#2 - Not necessarily software decode. It could be doing the decode on the graphics card.