Oddball Update

Microsoft is rolling out another spate of changes to the Xbox360 dashboard this spring (May 7th, to be precise), and they’re adding a hearty amount of new stuff. Along with a series of somewhat minor tweaks, fixes, and adjustments, some of the big new additions are:

• Support for streaming DivX, XviD and H.264 movies from your computer (yay!).
• When you score an achievement, the pop-up will tell you what acheivement it was and how many points it was worth (so you don’t have to quit out of the game to find out).
• Your Xbox Live contacts list can be integrated with your Windows Live Messenger contact list, so you can chat with your friends. In Messenger, your profile will show your gamertag and list what game you’re playing right now.
• The console can go into “low power mode” while background downloading a whole batch of files, in case you want to queue up some stuff and let it download overnight, and automatically turn off when done.
• You can now watch (and seek through) marketplace videos before they have finished downloading.

I’m most excited about the DivX and XviD support. Now we can get MPEG-4 video on our Xboxes, which should be especially good for high definition rips of TV shows or movies that we’ve downloaded over the web. XviD is also a great way to rip DVDs to disk, and now we have an easy way to watch them on our TVs too (I hate watching movies on my computer monitor).

The Windows Live Messenger integration, though? I dunno…at my company, we use Messenger as a work chat tool, and as a general indicator of who’s online and what they’re doing. Integrating that with my Xbox360 only makes it easier for people to interrupt me about work-related issues while I’m trying to friggin’ relax, so most likely, if I can disable that integration, I probably will. Not to say I plan to play games during work hours. I never do that. Unless it’s a special occasion. Like when my boss sanctions it, heh.

Categorized as Games/Console, Games