LG's hybrid Blu-ray/HD DVD standalone drive coming soon
By Erik Hanson 
posted Jan 9th 2007 10:57AM
posted Jan 9th 2007 10:57AM
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]
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.
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!
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.
#2 - Not necessarily software decode. It could be doing the decode on the graphics card.