The ipod will play 8 music/audio formats to ANYTHING (headphoens, car stereo, home speakers, computer, etc ...) with a 3.5 mm (aka 1/8" ) (standard) audio plug including Apple' s itunes music store purchases with ZERO problems.

So, basically MS trying to claim that the ipod will not support the Xbox is clearly some bogus over-engineering design on their part - instead of just offering a 3.5" mm plug for ANY Mp3 device - they choose to make it mount as a HDD to play files through - conveniently reading and approving secured WMA' s, etc ...

If they included a 3.5 mm passthrough* and offered a simple menu selection to play soundtrack on DISC or EXTERNAL SOURCE - problem easily solved but of course, that would not be punishing the ipod, would it?

* of course, it would be better if it were RCA' s or optical but that' s another story ...

umm, I dunno if u' ve read but MS wanted and could' ve made the 360 play any format from the Ipod, and I think the 360 will play any format, except for the music files downloaded from ITunes Music Store, and this has to do with licensing from apple. MS apparently asked Apple for licensing, offered them a deal, and Apple refused, they don' t want their music to be played on the 360, but other than this, I haven' t heard about any other format the 360 won' t play from the Ipod.

Where did i get the strange idea MS owns a part of apple.

Vx Chemical said:Where did i get the strange idea MS owns a part of apple.

Hmmm, somewhere in the past?

While Microsoft owned some small part in shares of Apple, it was non-voting stock, and they sold all of their shares a long time ago.

So just to be sure you all understand, Microsoft doesn' t own any share of Apple.

As for the iPod, I have a similar view to the original poster.

Microsoft talks about the 360 connecting to the iPod for very specific reasons. They want to show that they' re not " anti-iPod" , and steal some cool factor. But what they really are doing is to bring attention to the fact that the tunes bought on iTunes cannot play directly on the 360 from the iPod. Of course they bring no attention that these tunes can play on any CD player once you legally burn them to CDs. All they want people to remember is that there is some special Apple format for tunes that Apple wont allow them to use.

What Microsoft really want isn' t being able to play FairPlay DRMed AAC on the XBox 360, they want DRMed WMA tunes to play on the iPod. If DRMed WMA files played on the iPod, it would be declared the de-facto standard, Microsoft' s format would win, plain and simple.

Then, soon enough, labels would start to sell WMA only DRMed CDs with no standard audio, and force Apple to start using WMA. Then, your audio collection would remain confined to Windows, the latest CD' s will only play in Windows or an XBox etc.

Apple should only be forced to open/license it' s audio DRM format if it becomes mandatory on all digital music players and in all online stores.

i' ve seen the ipod being used on the 360 if thats what you mean from some videos at X05.