Slashdot Mirror
One Year of Xbox 360
Gaming Nexus has up an article marking (kinda) the one-year anniversary of the 360's launch. Author Charles Husemann touches on the important moments in the console's first year on the market, discusses what Microsoft has done right, and talks about where the console is probably going in the future. From the article: "Obviously digital content such as TV and movies are going to be a big deal (assuming Microsoft can get those servers running smoothly and release bigger hard drives). I know I can stream it from my PC but I'd love to have Major Nelsons' podcast automatically downloaded to my 360 every week. I'd also like to see Microsoft resist the temptation to cram a browser into the system as I know they are going to get pressure to do so with the Wii and the PS3 having that built in. Instead I'd love to have a simple, easy to use RSS reader that can stream headlines along the bottom of the screen when I'm in the dashboard."
I think I found his source: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=11555
He fails to mention the part about an estimated four million sales in the last three months.
Actually, I DO want a browser on my console - preferrably one I can access even when I'm playing a game. It'll make gamefaqs runs that much easier - no having to run into the other room everytime I want to look something up.
Yes, I'm lazy.
XBMC will play everything expect HD content due to it having only a P3-700MHz processor. Though Xvid and Divx support are huge features that are missing from the 360. I currently use an Xbox with XBMC and the Xbox Media Extender to connect to my media center PC. This gives me the best of both worlds. My new hope is for Linux on the PS3 to really take off so we can have a really good media player on that or at least turn it into a cheap HD MythTV frontend (and yes I said cheap, building a computer that can be an HD MythTV frontend will normally be higher than $499).
Skimped on the graphics?? Hahaha, that's a laugh riot. The 10MB of EDRAM is only used for high-speed framebuffer. Compare to Wii's 3MB, and PS3's 0MB. Looking at the specs, it seems that the 360 is likely the most capable of the systems in the gfx dept, but we'll see what the PS3 offers up despite having 1/2 the graphics memory of the 360.
Oh, and by the way, "train wreck" is two words. You might want to check on things like that before trying to come up with a clever catch phrase.
It's pretty easy to get transcoding set up for streaming non-WMV formats from your PC. Double-click tversity installer. Double-click ffdshow installer...tada!