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.
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
(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.
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.
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.
Makes more sense when you realize its in % of total time using the console. A console that's used twice per month for streaming has a higher streaming percent than one that's used every day for both gaming and streaming.
My 4 year old has turned my PS3 into a Netflixstation 3. Though I'm just as guilty; it is just so damned convenient!
Carrier IQ?
I stream with the Wii because I don't have an HDTV nor will we for the foreseeable future. I'm guessing there are plenty of people in the same boat as me who, with one kid and one on the way, one income and very little disposable cash, can't seem to justify a $500 TV purchase when we're using Netflix instead of cable to save money in the first place.
Most peoples internet connections don't do HD streaming very well. People who own a Wii are also less likely to own an HD TV than people who own a PS3. So it doesn't matter that it can't do 1080p.
Nintendo did it right in terms of how it handles its realtionship with netflix.
Microsoft insists you have gold membership before you can use netflix on the 360. This costs you an extra 10$/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--
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.
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.
(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.
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.
And they're streaming video with it 33% of the time? Hmmm.
It's a really really confusing statistic. If the average PS3/Xbox 360 owner played *games* for 6 hours a week and watched an hour of Netflix it would be "15%"
Compare that to a Wii owner who might play 40 minutes a week and play Netflix 20 minutes a week. Or maybe the average Wii owner plays 40 hours and also watches 20 hours of Netflix.
Without an absolute unit of measurement "%" means almost nothing. If I had a wii it would probably be used almost 100% for streaming.
When Nintendo named the Wii back in 2005...I doubt they imagined that Streaming would become a popular use for the device.
None of us want to go around saying "I stream with my Wii"
We'd all sound like a bunch of 5 yr olds making obvious but inappropriate comments. :)
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
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.
AGING is just the American English form of AGEING -- both are acceptable.
Argh! I should have read more closely!
I don't know if there's an equivalent of FFCoder for Linux, but off the top of my head I'd say Handbrake will probably be of some use to you. Expression might work under Wine but in any case the scripting part, which you would definitely need (no batch processing without it), is in Powershell so you're SOL there I think.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
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.