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.

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.

Have a look at the link below

[bogie]

To see just how screwed up Microsoft is regarding codec support. http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/archive/2007/09/24/1212782.aspx [msmvps.com] Each piece of hardware they sell can play only certain file formats. Zune goes outside of WMP 11 to purchase music. Previous Plays for Sure users got screwed when the Zune and the new music store came out. Xbox 360 has an all together different store for buying movies and TV. Zune has retarded restrictions on how it interacts with Windows Media Center. Regular XP and Vista users can't access the Xbox 360 store. Talk about a fucked up and disjointed ecosystem.

To make matters worse the rest of the industry still thinks it is a good idea to fragment things even more. You have an ever increasing number of companies that want to sell things directly and bypass both Apple and Microsoft. Within a few years we will have 50 different place to buy movies and music from all with their own software interfaces and supported hardware.

Is there really still any wonder at all why consumers stick to downloading movies and music from P2P and Newsgroups?

Re:From MS: Vista can't do it, use something else

[Bryansix]

As an aside, why are they even using FAT32 at all?

Because almost all external hard drives are pre-formatted in FAT32 for compatability. You can reformat these drives later to another alternative but it sounds like the XBox 360 only sees FAT32 formatted drives. I could be wrong.

Can we stop with the "Drops?"

[balthan]

Seriously. Is it to difficult to type "to be released?"

Can I make a request?

[Atario]

That we all institute a moratorium on saying that such-and-such drops, with the intent to mean debuts?