XBox Adding HD Tuners Next Year

iloveCarla writes "Microsoft is partnering with Toshiba to turn the Xbox into a full fledged HTPC. With built-in HD DVD, a larger hard drive, revamped "MCE" interface, and possibly HDTV tuners, the Xbox would be in a better position to compete against the PS3 in the race to serve as the defacto entertainment hub for couch potatoes. According to the article "The new device is expected to be released late in 2008 or at the 2009 CES show in Las Vegas."

Haha, I knew it was coming.

[Charcharodon]

Well so much for this generation of consoles being the end all be all "it just works, I don't have to upgrade every year" devices that were supposedly hamering the last nails into the coffin of PC gaming.

Looks to me like we'll be seeing XBOX and PC gaming being synonymous in the next year or two. They've already got the hardware rating system in Vista as well as USB adapters for their wireless 360 controlers. It's just a matter of adding direct game support for XBOX titles on the PC.

Considering how fast PC hardware advances in comparison to consoles there is no reason not too. The only thing they'll have to watch out for is letting the software developers get too far head of the average customer's hardware, the very reason many gamers have abandoned PC gaming in the first place.

Personally I would love to see this since I have already distilled my living room entertainment package down to a PC and a 40" LCD HD TV, and don't care spoil that with the noisy, anemic, unreliable, one trick pony, 360, just to be able to play the few console titles I'm interested in.

HDTV Tuners?

[zbend]

Cable cards? Last time I checked, besides over the air or unencrypted HD, the only way devices that can record HD content from your cable or satellite provider is with a cable card. If there is anything that's had more hardware problems than the xbox, without any of the popularity, its cable cards. Until that whole situation gets figured out I don't see anyone providing a good HD DVR.

Re:Not the enhancement people really want

[DJCacophony]

Microsoft has already done this. They have identified the problem that caused the general hardware failure (insufficient heat dissipation and weak solder) and retooled their assembly line to fix it. Any hardware failures you hear about are older xboxes. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems [wikipedia.org] for more info.

Re:Still no SMB shares though

[andrewuoft]

It supports UPNP, try something like TVersity

Re:Not the enhancement people really want

[slyn]

The "Halo Limited Edition Xbox 360's" or whatever their official name is are the end of all these problems. For the most part the problem has been fixed on the newer systems from what I understand (they have better heatsinks), but the halo xbox's are the first to use the Falcon chipset and have a 65 NM processor instead of a 90 NM processor.

Assuming that what I read once at Ars Technica (that a dual core from 65 NM to 45 NM is 10 degrees C and 10 Watts less under load (at the same clock)) extrapolates perfectly from an X86 dual core to a PowerPC tri core then the difference in produced temperature should be 15 degrees C. Unfortunately, it's only on the halo limiteds AFAIK as of now, but eventually it will seep down to the Elites and Premiums the same way HDMI did.

Re:Still no SMB shares though

[Anonymous Coward]

You can if you use a Media Center PC with the xbox or xbox360 as an extender. The xbox can already access shares on the MCE PC, but here's how to set it up to access shares on other machines on your network, for those that are interested. (These instructions are for a Windows XP MCE):

Log in to the Media Center PC with an admin account. Modify the account properties and add a login script for each the automatically-created accounts for the media center extenders (the number of these accounts will depend on how many times you've added an extender to the MCE PC). So, go to the 'Local Users and Groups' MMC snap-in, and for each MCX account, :

right-click user account, properties
Go to 'Profile' tab
in the Logon Script field, enter whatever you want to name your script, e.g.: mcxlogon.bat

Go to C:\WINDOWS\system32\GroupPolicy\User\scripts\Logon and create the above .bat script file with the following contents:

    net use \\[PC#1]\ipc$ /u:mcx [password for 'mcx account']
    net use \\[PC#2]\ipc$ /u:mcx [password for 'mcx account'] ... ... Replacing the [] and their contents with respective computer names and password of your choosing.

Again, do this for each of the media center extender accounts on the MCE machine (e.g., mcx1, mcx2, mcx3, etc...). The same script file (and thus the same 'mcx' account / [password] credentials) can be used for all these accounts to simplify things on the PCs you're connecting to.

To determine which user account on the MCE PC (mcx[1...n] is being used by a specific Media Center Extender (for example, if you wanted the media center extender in the bedroom to have access to shares that you don't want the family-room to have):
    Open Media Center Extender Manager
    Double click on extender, note contents of "User Account" field ... In that scenario, you would obviously need different login scripts for the two different credential sets, assigning the correct script to the corresponding account's "Logon Script" field above. Adjust remaining instructions as needed if this is what you want to do.

Now, go create the "mcx" account on all these other PCs (in Windows or in Samba -- for XP Home machines, it's a little trickier but doable), and assign the password you decided on to the account. Also, make sure that this account has permissions for whatever shares you want your xbox to have permissions to.

Restart the media center extender software on the xbox [360], then do the following:

Go to "My Videos" or "My Pictures" or "My Music" and hit the i/"more" button on remote
Choose "Add Videos" or "Add pictures" or "Add Music"
Choose to add folders, then check the box to add shared folders from another computer, hit next

You should see all network shares on the PCs that you've established an IPC connection with.

Note that there's nothing all that special about these steps in terms of basic requirements for connecting to a network share. They're simply creating accounts, granting rights, and connecting to SMB shares (with the script). The only reason why all these hoops must be jumped through is because for some ridiculous reason, the Media Center Extender software WON'T simply list SMB servers on the subnet and their shares, automatically trying authenticating to each them. This is one thing I'd like to see corrected in future versions of the MCX software.

All that being said, I also use XBMC on a modded xbox and agree that it's a quality piece of software, and I wish MS would offer similar features (since it's obviously unrealistic to think they'd allow execution of arbitrary code).

Re:Adding New Features to Consoles

[Fulg]

The trade off between storage can be seen last gen. Look at the Xbox version of the Prince of Persia games compared to the Gamecube. The difference in music is easily identifiable and is caused by the Xbox using 9GB disks while the Gamecube used 1.5GB disks.

As someone who worked on Sands of Time, I can tell you that both versions used practically the same data, so the perceived difference is probably due to the superior sound output of the Xbox (5.1 vs ProLogic II). Graphically there were some minor improvements on the textures, models and lighting on Xbox, but essentially all platforms were identical -- you got the same game no matter which platform you had.

The Xbox version could fit on a GC disc (IIRC the entire game is about 1.2GB), but since we had the extra DVD space we included more stuff on it (bonus videos, ports of the original POP and POP2, etc). I don't recall which extras were present on the GC version.