Slashdot Mirror
Aging Consoles Find New Life As Video Streamers
MojoKid writes "Microsoft's Xbox 360 console is six years old. The Nintendo Wii is five years old, and so is the Sony PlayStation 3. All three are due for an overhaul (can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?), and while they're still popular gaming platforms, consoles are really starting to shine as streaming media centers. According to market research firm Nielsen, streaming video on game consoles is up over last year. Xbox 360 owners now use their consoles to stream video 14 percent of the time, which is almost as much as PS3 users (15 percent). But it's the Wii that sees the most time as a streaming device, with Wii owners using their consoles to stream video a third of the time."
>(can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?)
yes, I do it daily... TF2 still rocks.
No wonder that set-top boxes don't sell.
This device has barely taken off, it will crush all others. I want one and I can't have it. I feel nothing for the Wii or PS. I havent bought a console since 8 bit nintendo
I definitely use my PS3 to stream Netflix more than I play games on it. Although, that is only the case because I built my own gaming PC last year. If I didn't have my gaming PC I'd definitely be playing my PS3 a lot more.
The Wii has a pretty good Netflix client/interface. MUCH better than on my TiVo (which mostly just rebuffers and crashes). But, I recently got a Roku XD for $50, and that's better, still. Plus, it does HD and HDMI, which the Wii doesn't.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
PS3:Cell processor one 64-bit PowerPC core and 8-vector processors. X-box 360: Three 64-bit PowerPC cores.
And they're streaming video with it 33% of the time? Hmmm.
(can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?)
What's so hard to imagine? Tons of people do it just fine.
Do I have to dedicate my N64 to this purpose or can I finish this Mario game?
But it's the Wii that sees the most time as a streaming device, with Wii owners using their consoles to stream video a third of the time.
The fact that a Wii is used for streaming 33 *percent* of the time has nothing to do with the *amount* of time spent streaming. It's not only possible, but very likely that XBox and PS3 users spend a lot more total time using their consoles than Wii users.
Seems to me like the distribution may have a lot todo with the availability of games that have some replay value.
Everybody I know who has a wii, with the exception of one guy who uses it for exercise, only plays it when they people over. Either they get the kids playing to keep them busy or they get a bunch of slightly drunk adults jump around like idiots.
I've been gaming on a PC that's getting close to 9 years old. I'm finally planning to build a new one. Before anyone talks about incremental upgrades, I changed the power supply when it failed, and replaced the motherboard with a similar tech-level lower quality one when it had an issue (which has left me with an overheating southbridge).
It's this kind of thinking that leads to divorce - and, no, I would never want to re-purpose my spouse as a "media streamer".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I used mine for streaming video for years. I even bought the remote for it. Worked really well, until I got a hold of an Apple TV and hacked it. Apple TV Works great as a video streaming device.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
I just recently started using my Xbox 360 for streaming Netflix, primarily because it supports 5.1 sound but also because of the better interface. My blu-ray player will do streaming also, but is rather more limited and only does stereo. The downside though is that Microsoft requires you to have an Xbox Live Gold account to do this, which is a whole other subscription on top of the Netflix subscription.
These days, I could. Because the 80s and 90s were something of a fluke in which hardware was progressing at a rapid rate, it coincided with the growth of the video game industry and attracted a lot of hardware geeks. But that era is gone, and hardware has stabilized to the point where new games are coming out targeting five year old hardware, and most people are okay with it. Skyrim runs on my first-generation Intel iMac from 2006.
Diminishing returns in game development has reached the point where the jump to more powerful hardware, and therefore even higher-fidelity visuals, is just costing too much to justify the expense. That is the state of technology today. Some people don't like it because they want to forever relive the glory days of 90s MHz marketing and 3D card upgrades, but it's over, and thank goodness.
Up until my TV died last christmas eve and I replaced it with a new one that had netflix built in. Although now the Xbox has Hulu plus as well. I did let my XBL subscription lapse last spring. With netflix built in, no longer needed it and wasn't playing many games. Now that it's winter I've gotten a new 1 year XBL subscription along with Battlefield 3.
My TV, internet, phone bundle is $150 a month and that includes all the premium channels, HDTV, DVR, etc. I thought about just getting cable internet and then Hulu plus and netflix and MLB.tv. But I got to adding it up and without the bundle the total would still be around $100 per month. And there would be a few shows I like and would miss or else have to order via iTMS or another source. And I'm not really interested in Bit Torrenting.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
My 4 year old has turned my PS3 into a Netflixstation 3. Though I'm just as guilty; it is just so damned convenient!
can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old?
Yes I can, because I do. Plus, thus far, all major games have a minimum requirement of DirectX 9 which shipped in 2002.
I bought my XBOX 360 to play a handful of games. Since getting burnt-out on them, and not finding anything else I really want to spend hours a week playing- I use mine 100% as a streaming media player. It actually does a much better job of playing Netflix movies than some of the more-dedicated players I've tried, like Roku and AppleTV. It works great with a universal remote (Logitech Harmony), and it's also great to be able to search with a wireless USB keyboard. It's a great DVD player too, although it isn't used as much for that since it doesn't do Blu-ray.
Xbox 360? Hell I use my original Xbox with XBMC to stream video every day.
Carrier IQ?
Nintendo did it right in terms of how it handles its realtionship with netflix.
Microsoft insists you have gold membership before you can use netflix on the 360. This costs you an extra 10$/mo. Combined, if all you want is streaming, this costs you 18$/mo. This double dipping to use netflix prompted me to shell out the one time cost of a wii. It streams netflix 80% or more of the time I use it.
I recently set up a sony blueray disc player for a friend of my sister's, which can stream netflix. In order to activate it, you have to agree to an eula from sony, register the device for streaming through sony, agree to a sony tos, *THEN* you can activate the device through netflix. Once you do, the netflix experience is lacklustre, having super teeny tiny cover art thumbnails, and a terrible search experience from the remote.
I had none of those issues with the wii. Go to the wii market, pull the free app, sign up with netflix and register the device, and off you go. No 3rd parties to the transaction, no eulas and tos to agree to with nintendo to enable it, nada. The cover art is the wii netflix app is large enough to read from the couch easily, and it is quick and easy to search with the wiimote without entering the konomi code on the damn thing just to pick a letter.
The only drawback of the wii is that it is a low resolution device, and can't really push HD. If it did better than 480p at max it would be an ideal netflix appliance.
I don't know what the situation is on the ps3 with netflix, since last I heard psn was free, but with an abysmally one sided eula--
Same here. My primary gaming machine is running Win2K Pro Service Pack 2 DX 9.0c. I confess I'm cheating a little since it does have a new power supply and a 5830, but the motherboard is a single core AMD at least 6 years old. I like how the submitter says "half a decade" to try to make it sound older.
Steam won't run on my machine, but that's more their loss than mine.
Long time Mac programmer here, and that includes PowerPC assembly. PowerPCs at the same clock rate of an x86 were about 20% faster in general. The 2x situations were rare and highly specialized situations. And of course that 20% PowerPC advantage was overwhelmed by x86 going to higher clock rates.
http://mediatomb.cc/
Works great with my PS3! Just make sure you hook up your console with an Ethernet cable - I got a lot of stuttering on fast-paced video over the wireless. I can play full 1080p MPEG4 video over 100 Mbps Ethernet.
I use several XBoxes as streaming media consoles. They all have hard drive upgrades and softmods which means they can hold a lot more than the standard 8/10GB drives ever could - up to and including XBox game images, playlists, emulators, and they're all network mapped to each other and the 18TB media/file server.
So I could watch anything that's on the server or any console on any other console in the house, or kick up the game images and have a LANParty.
I dunno, they just seem to be built for it. It's certainly a lot less hassle than stumping up 15x the cost for systems that make 10x the noise, have 10x the power (and power requirement), take 100 times longer to boot... just plug it in and go.
The only downside to XBox is getting hold of controllers these days. New ones just plain ain't available and the secondhand market is dry at the best of times. On saying that the last controller I bought (blisterpacked XBox brand, standard size) came with a free console... Made me laugh when I got told that you could only get XBox controllers with a console kit (box, cables and controller)... and they were on special offer at £15!
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
What is new about this?
I have done the same thing with my old modded Xbox years ago. Streaming video from a pc/NAS that is.
Had to stop when the poor box couldn't handle decoding the newer video files in real time any more, because they kept getting bigger. Well, I went from Xbox to Zbox.
I guess with the new ones you don't need to mod and install XBMC anymore? That means they always had this feature, so it's not new.
(can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?)
What's so hard to imagine? Tons of people do it just fine.
Its also a bogus comparison. Consoles don't have a constant stream of upgraded CPU, RAM and video cards. In comparison the hardware specs of consoles are static. So a game written in year 1 of the console's life has the same hardware requirements as a game written in year 5 of the console's life. If that year 5 game has better visuals it is only because the programmers have greater experience and skills with respect to getting every bit of performance out of that 5 year old hardware. This is quite different than the PC world where a game written 5 years later will have very different minimum system requirements and deliver better visuals because of more capable hardware.
... considering that the wii is not even capable of hi-def video, I find it surprising that it would be used for video streaming.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Long time Mac programmer here, and that includes PowerPC assembly. PowerPCs at the same clock rate of an x86 were about 20% faster in general. The 2x situations were rare and highly specialized situations. And of course that 20% PowerPC advantage was overwhelmed by x86 going to higher clock rates.
What are you smoking?
I am a dyed in the wool PC Gamer. In my life I have only ever owned three gaming consoles: an Atari 2600, a Wii (bought so my wife could use Wii Fit), and now Xbox 360. After our introductory year our cable company wants to charge $16 a month for the DVR, so I looked into TiVo and other dedicated machines. $600. Heck no. HDHomerun Prime's comparable to a year of I already had spare parts enough (save for a motherboard) to make an HTPC, but the power supply was raised by a family of Dust Busters and the chassis's just butt ugly, so for $150 I got a slick device to put next to the TV, and I can explain simply to my wife that "we're using it as our own cable box." Not to mention join my D&D group for gaming outside of tabletop night. A little bit of research leads to the Xbox even starting up into TV, so the Wife Acceptance Factor is the best I could hope for. Image quality of TV is just as good as the cable company DVR, and the GUI loads better looking.
My PS3 is used for Netflix like 90% of the time, a DVD/Blu-Ray player 5% of the time, and NCAA Football 5% of the time.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
No wonder that set-top boxes don't sell.
The bad part about this is that the set-top boxes draw a very small fraction of the power as the game consoles, which are power hungry beasts. I'm just spouting crap off randomly, as is my wont, but the Wii would have to be the lowest power consumer of the 3 major console systems. However the Wii would still be vastly more power hungry than a Roku, TiVo or Apple TV.
Okay, okay. I can't believe I'm doing this here on Slashdot (backing up my assertions with references) but here you go:
http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-356-2.htm
The Wii uses 1/10th the power of an XBox 360 or PS3. A quick search shows that a Roku uses around 5-6 watts when in use, which is half of the Wii's 11 watts.
So the moral of the story - using an XBox 360 or PS3 for streaming is very, very inefficient power-wise compared to dedicated set-top boxes or even the Wii.
Better known as 318230.
You haven't even upgraded your OS? Enjoy your malware.
no one even sells CRTs any more.
Pawn shops and charity shops do. There are still people who would buy a used CRT SDTV instead of a new HDTV, and not just people who play old NES games that need a CRT SDTV for the Zapper.
I suspect it is mostly PEBKAC errors
Yeah, like downloading a "codec pack" to watch a video, elevating to install it, and finding the "codec pack" is really a fake antivirus. Or fake AVs that use a code execution vulnerability in Adobe Reader to pose as an update for Adobe Reader.
Skyrim requires a minimum of 512MB dedicated graphics memory
Then how does it run on a Sony machine with a GeForce 7800 and half that?
can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?
My gaming rig still rocks an Athlon 64 X2 6000+
You wouldn't believe the kind of flak I get from teenagers whose mom's pay for their computers. Yet I get by just fine in modern games at decent quality settings. It takes a level of understanding that most aren't willing to study for, to know which graphics settings are bottlenecked by which piece of hardware. If you've ever seen a "tweak guide" for a game... yeah, you basically need to be able to come up with one of those on the fly for any game you play. The guides do make great study material, though, if you're looking for that kind of knowledge, especially the ones with benchmarks, graphs, and multiple test platforms.
Just thought I'd mention it. "Aging" is not a word in the English dictionary.
Since it does SD instead of HD, you get less "Buffering/adjusting playback" issues.
ALL models have Wifi as well.
There is a better way of stopping malware infections which is to equip your PC with a brain. They are free in most places and get upgraded with use.
Long time Mac programmer here, and that includes PowerPC assembly. PowerPCs at the same clock rate of an x86 were about 20% faster in general. The 2x situations were rare and highly specialized situations. And of course that 20% PowerPC advantage was overwhelmed by x86 going to higher clock rates.
What are you smoking?
My guess would be deep fried Kool-Aid.
no it hasnt, a 6 year old gaming pc could run the same software at the same quality levels and at the same resolutions. People forget this on consoles, 640P maybe 720 max no aa and very limited draw distances makes up most of the magic
right up to the point that you discover that Sony has implemented even more DRM preventing streaming of rips you own....Cinavia.....which is sad really as I really like to buy movies and then rip to my Tversity streamer....but Sony is making it onerous and difficult.
I tried this and was able to get my XBox 360 to talk to my Ubuntu computer. The XBox could see my media directory on Ubuntu (over the network) just fine. While it would play a .wmv quite well, it would not play most .avi's. .mks files are popular now but nope. .mp4? Sorry. I figured if I wanted to support this type of environment I'd have to be ambitious and convert my media library to .wmv which isn't worth the time and frustration. I'd still like to set up a media center but I think it's going to be some sort of Linux solution.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Long time Mac programmer here, and that includes PowerPC assembly. PowerPCs at the same clock rate of an x86 were about 20% faster in general. The 2x situations were rare and highly specialized situations. And of course that 20% PowerPC advantage was overwhelmed by x86 going to higher clock rates.
What are you smoking?
No smoking. Just years of experience back in the day porting games from Windows to Mac and optimizing those games with hand coded PowerPC assembly as needed. PowerPC only outperformed x86 by a high degree in very narrow specialized areas. Overall it took a bit more tuning and assembly language to get the Mac/PowerPC games to perform comparably to their x86 counterparts. Apologies if reality did not live up to the marketing and cherry picked Apple demos. Apple benchmarks were also rigged to a degree. For example Apple would use an old 486 optimized version of the benchmark on Pentium and PentiumPro systems, while using a recently built and properly optimized version of that benchmark on the PowerPC side.
Also the Cell{64-PowerPC plus 8 vector processor} design was started in the year 2000, so its really taken x86 10 years to catch up to an 11 year old PowerPC design. How Long will it take x86 to reach the performance of IBM's A2 processor which has 18 PowerPC 64-bit cores and the A2 uses 50-watts manufactured at 45nm.
You haven't even upgraded your OS? Enjoy your malware.
I do enjoy my malware, as a matter of fact. One of the reasons I've stayed with Win2K for so long is because I'm running a firewall program that I wrote the HTTP filter for called AtGuard on it. Symantec bought it and turned it into Norton Internet Security. Over the past ten years, I've run into a number of oddball things that begin to execute and attempt to make outbound connections, and I've stopped and excised every one. I have never had to get rid of something by reinstalling Win2K. I have, however, detected and informed a number of web site admins that their PHP stuff had been infected and is distributing viruses. I could just install something like what you're running and become dependent on patches from Microsoft and have no defense against zero-days, but I think my approach is better and saves me a lot of time. How many times have you had to "upgrade"? How many times have you had to pay for yet another iteration of Windows?
Yes I can, because I do. Plus, thus far, all major games have a minimum requirement of DirectX 9 which shipped in 2002.
That's why consoles are a blight on game design. We're talking about a 9 year old software standard.
Om, nomnomnom...
Guess I won't see you in Battlefield 3.
Microsoft wouldn't have paid IBM a Billion dollars to design a PowerPC processor for the Xbox-360 if their was only a 20% performance gain. So all that B.S. how you coded in assembly just makes it more apparent how this site is monitored by the thought police.
Microsoft wouldn't have paid IBM a Billion dollars to design a PowerPC processor for the Xbox-360 if their was only a 20% performance gain.
Performance was not the only consideration, the PowerPC based solution would generate much less heat than the comparable x86 based solution. Recall how the original XBox had some heat related issues. Also PowerPC was a simpler architecture to customize. Note the XBox used a highly customized CPU, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_(processor). PowerPC or x86, a customized solution would be expensive.
I have been streaming netflix through the wii since they started offering the service. I have not played a game on it since. The bad thing is, I have several games still in the original wrappers just sitting there and others that were only played a couple of times. When my income tax money comes through, I will be purchasing a cheap computer to stream through. This way I could stream everything - no matter the site. I already have a computer on another tv and it paid for itself in 3 months after I had cable turned off. In the meantime, the wii works great but when it is replaced, who knows what will happen to it... I'm just not into gaming anymore. That is the life of a gaming console to me though sometimes I wished I still had the atari 2600 and non-tech games it had.
It's really a shame that none of these consoles support .mkv, the dominant media format.
I recently bought a SECOND XBox 360. They are that good as a multimedia device. And since World of Warcraft is even older than 5 years, my 5 year old computer runs it just fine, thank you very much.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
Every generation of a processor is a customization. POWER1 to POWER8 each step is a customization. PowerPC 601 to PowerPC 970 each a customization. Cell BE to IBM's PowerXcell 8i also a customization. And your implying that the Power Architecture in the Xbox 360 has been modified to deviate from the Power Architecture, that's just insane, nor is the Power Architecture in the PS3. IBM will not allow a licensee to modify the architecture, yet they can probably add extensions. IBM defines how the POWER Architecture is defined, and licensee implement those changes. licensee's Microsoft, Samsung, BAE, Freescale, Toshiba, Sony, etc.
Not the only consideration. To compare PowerPC and x86 each manufactures on the same node say 65nm, PowerPC has a smaller die area, uses less wattage, has higher performance, and is cheaper to manufacture. So are those the considerations your talking about.
Guess I won't see you in Battlefield 3.
Battlefield 3 appears to be more of the exception than the rule. I'm glad there's an exception.
I think it can do 720p with the extra cable.
So many Wiis gathering dust can now get put to good use streaming video!
Its not the PowerPC instruction set that was customized. It was the chip. 3 cores, some other Cell-related things, ROM for Microsoft's security code, etc. As a RISC design it was easier to put 3 PowerPC cores on a single chip than 3 x86 cores. Look at the link previously provided.
Yes, things like wattage were probably far more important than the general 20% performance advantage. Actually wattage in particular probably made the PowerPC the only choice. The XBox barely had enough cooling as it is.