Xbox Live Fall Update Drops Tomorrow

Game|Life has a rundown on the Fall Update for Xbox Live. In addition to the Friend of a Friend feature we discussed last week, you'll also be seeing the first of the Xbox Originals download titles, a few Arcade games will be a bit lower cost, and a new 'family timer' option will let parents put caps on service use time. "You'll also be able to expand your bio, providing more detailed information about yourself to the Xbox Live community ... apparently I wasn't the only one going blind trying to watch those itty-bitty move previews, because now you'll be able to see them full-screen. The update also comes with "enhanced video codec support," which means that your DivX and Xvid files will play on your 360." Remember, if you don't want everyone seeing the folks on your Friends List you need to change your settings now. Plus, everybody should snag Psychonauts; make Tim Schafer a happy man for Christmas.

Comments

Compatible Media Streamers

[falzbro]

Just a heads up for some poeple who intend to use the Xvid support but want to stream. The 360 requires a UPnP server to do it, they prefer you use Windows Media Center or whichever version of Vista does that. However, there are several other alternatives. The one I was able to get work best on FreeBSD (actually, the only one to work on FreeBSD) was ushare. There are several other options for linux, as well as windows and OSX.

Re:Compatible Media Streamers

[Nerdfest]

TVersity (for windows boxes) is quite nice too. I've tried a couple under Ubuntu and Suse, and all are better than the crippled Windows Media Connect software and Media Player 11. Tversity is the best I've seen though, wish they had a Linux version.

Re:Compatible Media Streamers

[radish]

I'm not really sure what you're complaining about here. The 360 will stream from any compatible upnp server. Tversity isn't a "hack", just a upnp server. I can stream videos from my desktop (or my server) just fine...no laptop required.

And as for your "There's no reason why the 360 couldn't act like a normal PC and just directly play media off my desktop hard drive" - what protocol would you like them to support? SMB? NFS? Personally I prefer upnp (although it's far from perfect) because it gives you different browsing models (like by Artist, Album etc) rather than just a file hierarchy.

When free60 finds a hole so they can run unsigned code, Microsoft patches the hole. Nooo! We can't have anyone violating our principle of control! Cunts.

Yeah, imagine that, they want people to actually pay for games.

Psychonauts

[hansamurai]

I started playing Psychonauts this weekend (on the original Xbox) and my God, is that a great game. I used to play Monkey Island and Full Throttle when I was younger so I don't know why I ignored this game for so long. Everything about it is awesome. Great graphics, great voice acting, great story, amazing level design. I put in about 12 hours this weekend and had to struggle to stop last night. I seriously have to recommend this game to just about everyone. Right now it's free on Gametap through the end of the year but you can also find it on Steam and now Xbox Live. I bought a copy from a friend for cheap and it's been worth every penny.

From MS: Vista can't do it, use something else

[Jesterboy]

Found through Xvid / DivX files link, there's this little gem:

12. What size USB storage device does the Xbox 360 support?

The Xbox 360 will support as big of a storage device as you can format using FAT32. Unfortunately when formatting a device in Windows Vista or Windows XP you will be restricted to a maximum FAT32 size of 32GB. You can work around this limitation by using a 3rd party utility or using an alternative Operating System that does not have this restriction. Please note that the maximum size of any single file on FAT32 is 4GB. Rather amusing. According to this article, the 32GB limit was decided upon due to FAT32's linear-time algorithms; above this limit, they start taking inordinate amounts of time to just calculate free space.

It was good for a chuckle, though.

Re:From MS: Vista can't do it, use something else

[antifoidulus]

They are telling you not to use XP as well. I decided to investigate this, and found a little nugget of typical Microsoftness from wikipedia:

Windows 2000 and Windows XP can read and write to FAT32 file systems of any size, but the format program on Windows XP can only create FAT32 file systems up to 32 GiB. The format program with Windows 2000, however, can in fact create FAT32 file systems larger than 32 GiB.

So they could do something in an older version of the OS that they cannot do in the newer?! Thats....Microsoft :P

As an aside, why are they even using FAT32 at all? There are better alternatives out there, and does Microsoft even use FAT32 for XP/Vista partitions anyway? I thought they used NTFS or some variant.

Re:From MS: Vista can't do it, use something else

[fotbr]

By default XP and Vista both use NTFS, but they retain the ability to do (some) FAT32 formatting to keep the users happy.

If they dropped FAT32, there'd be bitching and moaning here about how MS is "forcing" users to use something else.

Re:From MS: Vista can't do it, use something else

[Bryansix]

As an aside, why are they even using FAT32 at all?

Because almost all external hard drives are pre-formatted in FAT32 for compatability. You can reformat these drives later to another alternative but it sounds like the XBox 360 only sees FAT32 formatted drives. I could be wrong.

Re:List of features to be added / fixed:

[CSMatt]

Just as a heads up, don't click on that link. It causes your computer to scream "Hey, I'm looking at gay porn," among other things.

Really weird limitation

[iainl]

For some reason I haven't quite got my head around yet, when you come to try out the Divx streaming, be sure to do it via the WMP sharing and the "videos" option of the media tab. Not through Media Centre Extender. According to the docs, it doesn't work there.

Which is a bit strange, but the same goes for .mp4 files already, so there you go. I'm looking forward to not using Transcode360, as it's a bit flaky on my network, and my ageing PC isn't up to doing HD in realtime.

Re:List of features to be added / fixed:

[Ash-Fox]

Actually, it just brings up a note from TinyURL.

Notice from TinyURL admin: This URL opens a lot of windows with reportedly "distasteful" pictures and has audio saying "Hey everybody, I'm looking at gay porno." It may also crash your browser/computer.

Proceed to this site.

Now if you actually click the link there, you'll get Last Measure, but they've forced an extra step in there just to make trolls like this fail miserably.

This AC speaks the truth.

Have a look at the link below

[bogie]

To see just how screwed up Microsoft is regarding codec support. http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/archive/2007/09/24/1212782.aspx Each piece of hardware they sell can play only certain file formats. Zune goes outside of WMP 11 to purchase music. Previous Plays for Sure users got screwed when the Zune and the new music store came out. Xbox 360 has an all together different store for buying movies and TV. Zune has retarded restrictions on how it interacts with Windows Media Center. Regular XP and Vista users can't access the Xbox 360 store. Talk about a fucked up and disjointed ecosystem.

To make matters worse the rest of the industry still thinks it is a good idea to fragment things even more. You have an ever increasing number of companies that want to sell things directly and bypass both Apple and Microsoft. Within a few years we will have 50 different place to buy movies and music from all with their own software interfaces and supported hardware.

Is there really still any wonder at all why consumers stick to downloading movies and music from P2P and Newsgroups?

Can we stop with the "Drops?"

[balthan]

Seriously. Is it to difficult to type "to be released?"

Can I make a request?

[Atario]

That we all institute a moratorium on saying that such-and-such drops, with the intent to mean debuts?