It appears the XBox 360 will be getting an HD-DVD drive after all, as none other than Bill Gates himself announced at the CES show in Las Vegas during his keynote speech.

For those that don’t know, HD-DVD is the proposed new media format being championed by Toshiba which allows for even more data to be squeezed onto a little shiny plastic disc. HD-DVD has been fighting a battle with Sony’s own proposed system Blu-Ray (set to be part of the PS3’s specification) to become the standard for the next generation of media. The two systems are not compatible so there has been a lot of fence sitting going on to see which format wins the day before many companies make a choice one way or the other.

No pricing or details of how the drive will be connected have so far been given, but the best bet would seem to be an external drive connected to the XBox 360 which can only play HD-DVD movies. Games are likely to remain on standard DVDs, since otherwise it would force early adopters of the machine into buying the new drive, which would therefore seem to make the entire exercise rather pointless. If the upgrade is an extra box then what’s the benefit of that over a dedicated HD-DVD player? The only one I can see is the fact that it’s less things to actually hook up to the TV set, which may be an issue if your TV doesn’t have a large number of inputs.

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