Microsoft Announces Major Xbox Live Update 48
simoniker writes "Microsoft has announced its sixth major update to the Xbox Live online service for Xbox 360, with 85 new features and enhancements, including support for native 1080p games and movies, faster Xbox Live Arcade game list display times, and more options for video playback. The company has announced that it will debut the update Tuesday, October 31, and the free download will be available to all Xbox Live Silver and Gold account holders, and will not require the use of the Xbox 360's hard drive."
No DivX (Score:2, Interesting)
A lot of people are waiting for this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry.. I meant Yellow Dog.. (Score:2)
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It might just be a tech myth, but Bill Gates was rumored to have seen XBMC in operation on a modded XBox and asked "Why don't we have something like this?" I'm stunned that they haven't created their own version or just tried to hire the XBMC team to make it for the 360. They could sell it on Live Marketplace and make a killing.
And yes, without DivX support, it is useless.
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-Eric
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It's not a question of power, but codecs. If the DivX/XviD/Quicktime/Real/etc codecs aren't available, it can't play those videos, period. Could the codecs be added in the future? Almost certainly. Will they? Who knows. Assuming
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No, the likely reason MS is avoiding this is because Divx/Xvid-encoded files comprise the majority of copyright-violating video on the Interweb these days. Microsoft
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That doesn't mean I don't completely agree with you.
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They want you to watch illegal video in their format.
More Video Playback options?! (Score:2)
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# Stream WMV video from a Windows PC running Windows Media Player 11, Zune software, or Windows Media Connect.
# Play video from storage devices such as USB flash drives, Xbox 360 Memory Units, etc.
# Play video from CD or DVD da
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Note that WMC does _not_ work with Transcode360, though.
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Full List (Score:4, Informative)
"Lightning Fast" (Score:2)
Lightning-fast enumeration and listing of all Xbox Live® Arcade games on the console.
Indeed, enumeration of lists has been painfully slow, and the need to needlessly flip between screens causes you to have to do it over and over for many common operations (i.e. downloading more than one video or demo, hello?), making the user experience overall quite poor.
I wonder what exactly they changed to fix it? This is vague; it could refer to the bizarre way the 360 seems to count up its
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I have to admit this is so painfully slow at times, that this is the one feature I care about. Sad really, but it is important.
If this improves marketplace speeds I'll be very excited as well (though I sorta just wish companies would put stuff like free keys in one major download pack.)
BTW, another cool addition I've heard about (from Microsoft) is the ability to download new Xbox Live Arcade Demos immediatly, with out having to queue them u
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It enumerates every time you enter the Arcade section. My guess is that they read more data at once now, as before it seemed like it was reading one game at a time (find game on HDD/MU, make a call to get information, display it, repeat).
On the other hand, if such a minor thing is a major complaint, that mea
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I forgot at work I have a development kit and we do get early versions of many things, this being one. All I can say is it really is lightning fast.
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You should instead register a new username and be a little more subtle, something like "My Xbox 360 stutters a lot man how can it do 1080p?"
The fact that you don't have a 360 doesn't matter anyway.
For the record, I have noticed a little image tearing in a few games, but most run perfectly fine at 720p, at 60fps for most titles.
The 1080p support being added is an upscan afaik (for games) HD-DVD movies will be native 1080p however. The software upscale s
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That's a lot of pixels (Score:1)
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The Xbox 360 has 10MB of high-speed local framebuffer for the GPU that is used exclusively for the output frames (a 1920x1080@32bpp frame is 7.9MB). As well, it has a hardware scaling unit that does high quality upscaling to any resolution. The po
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As for "requiring things from developers", I was referring to the fact that MS requires (for example) six-channel Dolby sound. Before the 360 was out, I believe there were article
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One Problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Other than that, it is good to see Microsoft working on keeping the system up to date, as are some of the games (Perfect Dark Zero has updates 'frequently' compared to games such as Ridge Racer 6, which have glaring glitches that really disturb gameplay and the general feel of the game which are never patched). I hope more developers who are working on the 360 start following MS's lead and making sure all of their products are kept up to date and user friendly.
Personally... (Score:1)
I love my 360, I really do...but the little bugs and oddities (I download Live Arcade titles a lot...so m
Great, now give me some games (Score:2)
WMV playback from DVD and WMP11 (Score:1)
Have some nice looking high definition WMV-HD discs and it's nice to be able to watch them without having to disconnect my Sky HD box from the DVI input on my TV and plugging in my laptop (which is rather flakey at HD video playback too).
Like the handling of photographs, the only thing I don't really like is the way the WMP11 library and 360 presents the list of video clips available on my PC i.e. just a straight list of everything in it.
Makes it a pain in the