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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
The full list of changes can be found here.
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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.
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 point of all of this is that games will render at a lower resolution (usually 540p or 720p) and then scale up to 1080p at output. With this update, developers now have the option to render internally at 1080p if they wish, but even PS3 games aren't rendering at 1080p. Since there are no games rendering internally at 1080p right now, why add 1080p support at all? By scaling the image in hardware on the console itself, you get a better image than if you let your TV do it (scaling before analog conversion) and you eliminate any potential lag from TVs with poor scaling hardware. That means that even though games are still rendered internally at 720p, a 1080p-native display (DLP, LCD, Plasma) will no longer have to do any conversion of its own. The quality will be similar to an up-converting DVD player from 480p to 720p, for example.
Because scaling is done in hardware, Microsoft doesn't require anything from developers. They can choose whatever size is appropriate for their internal rendering (as noted above, usually 540p or 720p) and let the scaling unit take care of upscaling or downscaling to 1080i/p or 480i/p. Obviously games will look better when rendered at a higher internal resolution. And since the game always renders at the same resolution regardless, there's no tweaking that needs to be done to accomodate different resolutions (ie, a player at 480p is not going to have more free cycles for AI than a player at 1080p, since in both cases the image is rendered at 720p and then scaled in hardware).
What does this all mean? Well, you really can't talk about a game "supporting" 720p or 1080p on 360, as all games support all resolutions. All you can really say is what resolution is native to that game, as a game with a 540p native resolution will obviously look worse than a native resolution 1080p. But then, as Slashdotters like to say, graphics aren't all that matters. A game like Lego Star Wars II has no need to use a 1080p native resolution, for example. But since the console can now support it, 1080p users can play it in the resolution native to their display. I would assume that Sony's taken a similar approach with the PS3, but I'm probably wrong.
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.
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