Microsoft Announces Major Xbox Live Update

simoniker writes "Microsoft has announced its sixth major update to the Xbox Live online service for Xbox 360, with 85 new features and enhancements, including support for native 1080p games and movies, faster Xbox Live Arcade game list display times, and more options for video playback. The company has announced that it will debut the update Tuesday, October 31, and the free download will be available to all Xbox Live Silver and Gold account holders, and will not require the use of the Xbox 360's hard drive."

No DivX

What I want to know is when can we play something other than WMV files on the 360 media center. I realize there are tricks to do so, but my modded original xbox can play pretty much anything I throw at it without issue. Why can't a machine significantly more powerful do so?

More Video Playback options?!

I know it probably doesn't, but please, please, let this mean that they're going to allow video playback over UPnP shares, like they do with music. I currently use Connect360 (which I heartily recommend, I tried to use Twonkymedia on my Mac, its setup was weird and difficult to get to work, Connect360 works perfectly with a minimum of fuss, and has easy config options) to serve music from my Mac to my 360, which is quite convenient and cool. I'd love to be able to do the same with Video. But somehow I doubt Microsoft with surrender that much control.

Full List

The full list of changes can be found here [xbox.com].

"Lightning Fast"

From the list of changes:

Lightning-fast enumeration and listing of all Xbox Live® Arcade games on the console.

Indeed, enumeration of lists has been painfully slow, and the need to needlessly flip between screens causes you to have to do it over and over for many common operations (i.e. downloading more than one video or demo, hello?), making the user experience overall quite poor.

I wonder what exactly they changed to fix it? This is vague; it could refer to the bizarre way the 360 seems to count up its known games at human-visible speed, or possibly enumeration in the marketplace? Could this be Microsoft getting over its religion about using stupidly verbose XML web services for wire protocols? Or simply implementing caching to try to bandaid the problem?

That's a lot of pixels

What I want to know is how well the framerate holds up when the resolution in cranked to 1080p. I couldn't dredge up the info on what exactly MS is requiring from developers, although they all are likely tweaking for reasonable performance at the top setting.

One Problem

I'm hoping Microsoft will address a problem that a friend who works at Microsoft said they had recieved a lot of complaints over, one of which was from me as it can get pretty darn frustrating. When you download the trial of an arcade game on the Xbox Live and then delete it (whether because you don't want to buy it or you want to buy it at a later date), the game will always show up in the "My Games" part with no gamerscore attached which then lowers your overall points percentage. Not even deleting the game data on the system will fix this due to the fact that as soon as it is downloaded it is added to your profile on Xbox.com and your Gamercard.

Other than that, it is good to see Microsoft working on keeping the system up to date, as are some of the games (Perfect Dark Zero has updates 'frequently' compared to games such as Ridge Racer 6, which have glaring glitches that really disturb gameplay and the general feel of the game which are never patched). I hope more developers who are working on the 360 start following MS's lead and making sure all of their products are kept up to date and user friendly.

Personally...

I just hope this finally hammers out the bugs in PGR3 with the guide...I stopped playing the multi because bringing up the guide to change my music or similar would make it crash and force me to reboot, or a popup would tell me someone was online and that crashed the guide as well. I also hope that the lag during XBL sign-in won't be as noticeable....the whole console just grinds to a halt when I do it.

I love my 360, I really do...but the little bugs and oddities (I download Live Arcade titles a lot...so mentally I think of downloads as being on that tab....when they're not...) really do make it a weird place to do things.

Hopefully Marketplace will be a nicer place to browse now....hopefully.

Great, now give me some games

that shows what the xbox 360 can do and don't send out any more games that are upscaled to 720p.

WMV playback from DVD and WMP11

I'm rather glad that this is finally available.

Have some nice looking high definition WMV-HD discs and it's nice to be able to watch them without having to disconnect my Sky HD box from the DVI input on my TV and plugging in my laptop (which is rather flakey at HD video playback too).

Like the handling of photographs, the only thing I don't really like is the way the WMP11 library and 360 presents the list of video clips available on my PC i.e. just a straight list of everything in it.

Makes it a pain in the bum trying to find the clip you want in a list of 100s of files.

Re:1080p - Oh god...

Posting as AC makes your troll attempts easy to spot ;-)

You should instead register a new username and be a little more subtle, something like "My Xbox 360 stutters a lot man how can it do 1080p?"

The fact that you don't have a 360 doesn't matter anyway.

For the record, I have noticed a little image tearing in a few games, but most run perfectly fine at 720p, at 60fps for most titles.
The 1080p support being added is an upscan afaik (for games) HD-DVD movies will be native 1080p however. The software upscale should still look MUCH better for people whose TV's are native 1080p, as opposed to the TV doing the scale itself from 720p, which those of us with LCD monitors know.

Re:1080p - Oh god...

The 360 always renders all games in 720p internally. The 480i signal is simply a downsampled version, and the 1080p version is upsampled. There is no difference in framrate between different resolutions. On the other hand, since the source material is always 720p, upscaling it to 1080p won't buy you anything, unless you happen to have one of those LCD tvs with a really bad upscaler.

Re:Original XBox

"Gold" is the exact equivalent of the old Xbox Live service. "Silver" is free, and includes everything except the ability to play multiplayer games online.