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: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.