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As part of the ongoing effort by Toshiba and its supporters to give its HD-DVD high definition digital video disk a competitive edge over Sony's Blu-ray format. The format war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray has been going on since the two were first introduced and is prompted by the fact that players and disk drives designed for one format won't play the other. It's generally agreed that only one format (if either) will survive the format war, and for that reason consumers have been very slow to warm to either out of fear that they'll sink a lot of money into a technology that will be useless in the near future. In general, the key to winning the format war is to increase the appeal of one format over the other. The theory goes that the increased appeal will cause consumers to buy more equipment and movie titles in one format rather than the other. Then the movie studios and software companies will want to publish more titles in that format. Seeing more titles available in one format than the other will boost consumers' confidence in that format, and the war will be won by that format. Now both Toshiba and Sony are both trying to poise their proprietary formats to be the one that wins out in the end.

Both companies are trying to promote their own high definition digital video disk format by having drives for each available for popular video game systems. In the case of the HD-DVD format, the video game system that it's associated with is Microsoft's Xbox 360. (Microsoft is one of the backers of the HD-DVD format.) The Xbox 360's HD-DVD capabilities are provided by an add on HD-DVD drive. The HD-DVD drive allows the Xbox 360 to play high definition movies onto a HDTV screen, and it costs about two hundred dollars, which is far less than Toshiba's HD-DVD players. The drive is also said to boot up more quickly than Toshiba's stand alone HD-DVD players. As an extra incentive for people to try out the HD-DVD format, anyone who purchases an HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 can also choose three movie titles on HD-DVD discs from a list from several different movie studios.

The HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 does have some shortcomings though. For one thing the drive doesn't function as a stand alone HD-DVD player. That means that it doesn't really save anyone any money if it were to be bought in order to be used strictly as an HD-DVD player, because the HD-DVD drive and the actual Xbox 360 together cost about as much as one of Toshiba's stand alone HD-DVD players. That said the combination of the Xbox 360 and the HD-DVD drive is a great choice for anyone who wants to watch high definition digital video discs and play video games because it costs less than it would to buy a stand alone player and a video game system separately. Another disadvantage that this combination has though is that it doesn't have an HDMI connection which would otherwise optimize its ability to play high def programming and video.

In any case, the Xbox 360 and HD-DVD drive combination have the possibility of putting the HD-DVD format on top.