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Microsoft Announces Major Xbox Live Update
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."
What I want to know is when can we play something other than WMV files on the 360 media center. I realize there are tricks to do so, but my modded original xbox can play pretty much anything I throw at it without issue. Why can't a machine significantly more powerful do so?
Anail Nathrock Uthvass Bethudd Dochiel Dienve
I know it probably doesn't, but please, please, let this mean that they're going to allow video playback over UPnP shares, like they do with music. I currently use Connect360 (which I heartily recommend, I tried to use Twonkymedia on my Mac, its setup was weird and difficult to get to work, Connect360 works perfectly with a minimum of fuss, and has easy config options) to serve music from my Mac to my 360, which is quite convenient and cool. I'd love to be able to do the same with Video. But somehow I doubt Microsoft with surrender that much control.
The full list of changes can be found here.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Finally a 1080p input device, makes me happy I exchanged my old Samsung 1080p tv for a Samsung 1080p dlp with input support (what a stupid problem that was, who makes a 1080p tv that can't take 1080p input??).
:)
With the PS3 coming out 1080p will be available in a wide range, but this is good for people who already have a 360 (and a 1080p tv) as it's free features, not factoring the cost of the 1080p tv
From the list of changes:
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 known games at human-visible speed, or possibly enumeration in the marketplace? Could this be Microsoft getting over its religion about using stupidly verbose XML web services for wire protocols? Or simply implementing caching to try to bandaid the problem?
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You would be surprised how many people are holding off on buying a 360 for this simple feature alone. You wouldn't think it would be a big deal for people, but it certainly seems to be. You can't read any message board or blog site without seeing people wanting DivX support anymore. I suppose this will have to be done eventually to compete with the PS3, as it'll be bootable into Red Dog Linux, which already supports pretty much every codec out there. Competition is great, but man, some companies are really stubborn. They should have had a look at the XBMC and copied it entirely from the getgo, it was one of the most popular reasons people even bought the first XBox.
Between all the distros available, it gets my head broked.
What I want to know is how well the framerate holds up when the resolution in cranked to 1080p. I couldn't dredge up the info on what exactly MS is requiring from developers, although they all are likely tweaking for reasonable performance at the top setting.
Another recent change is that all subscribers to XBox Live service for the "classic" XBox were automatically transitioned to "Gold" status for the balance of their contract. Not sure if this is an "upgrade" or a "let's get even more cash out of them when they renew", since most of the gold features are useless unless you own a 360.
Posting as AC makes your troll attempts easy to spot ;-)
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 should still look MUCH better for people whose TV's are native 1080p, as opposed to the TV doing the scale itself from 720p, which those of us with LCD monitors know.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
Big update coincides with the major release of Final Fantasy XII (which is naturally not even mentioned on this now pro-MS site, yet Gears of War is?), as if it'll do anything. You crack me up.
I'm hoping Microsoft will address a problem that a friend who works at Microsoft said they had recieved a lot of complaints over, one of which was from me as it can get pretty darn frustrating. When you download the trial of an arcade game on the Xbox Live and then delete it (whether because you don't want to buy it or you want to buy it at a later date), the game will always show up in the "My Games" part with no gamerscore attached which then lowers your overall points percentage. Not even deleting the game data on the system will fix this due to the fact that as soon as it is downloaded it is added to your profile on Xbox.com and your Gamercard.
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.
Business Voyeur
The 360 always renders all games in 720p internally. The 480i signal is simply a downsampled version, and the 1080p version is upsampled. There is no difference in framrate between different resolutions. On the other hand, since the source material is always 720p, upscaling it to 1080p won't buy you anything, unless you happen to have one of those LCD tvs with a really bad upscaler.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Not quite true (PGR3 is 540p internally, AFAIK) but more important than that, this update will not just help those with bad scalers.
For one, for 1080p users it will reduce the number of scaling passes by at least one. Even if the display has a good scaler, one scaling pass is still better than two.
For another, this update will allow game developers to natively target 1080p with their games if they choose to do so. How many games will be able to maintain a good fill rate at that resolution, I have no idea, but it'll be interesting seeing what they choose to do with this new option.
Actually it is up to the game developer if they support 1080p or not. When you initialize the D3D device, you provide width/height, which could be min(CurrentScreenWidth,1280), min(CurrentScreenHeight, 720). This will limit your game to 720p and the game will be upscaled if the display resolution is higher.
However you can just init the device as the current screen resolution and it will run at 1080p if that is what is selected. I would guess in time the games will start supporting native 1080p.
For the recoder AFAIK some current games support 1080 as well, but not all.
I just hope this finally hammers out the bugs in PGR3 with the guide...I stopped playing the multi because bringing up the guide to change my music or similar would make it crash and force me to reboot, or a popup would tell me someone was online and that crashed the guide as well. I also hope that the lag during XBL sign-in won't be as noticeable....the whole console just grinds to a halt when I do it.
I love my 360, I really do...but the little bugs and oddities (I download Live Arcade titles a lot...so mentally I think of downloads as being on that tab....when they're not...) really do make it a weird place to do things.
Hopefully Marketplace will be a nicer place to browse now....hopefully.
Indeed, imagine my dissapointment. :) Just got a 360 and the only game I link so fat is pgr3. I don'like NFS much, I like realism more.
Anyway, I wondered why pgr3 didn't look like 720p. I have a 37" tv that has the resolution to show 720". After trying different game demos that I downloaded, I noticed the difference from them and pgr3. Now I just have to wait for Forza 2 which has been delayed until next year. yeay.
that shows what the xbox 360 can do and don't send out any more games that are upscaled to 720p.
I'm rather glad that this is finally available.
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 bum trying to find the clip you want in a list of 100s of files.
R Tape loading error, 0:1