Next week, on or around December 4th, Microsoft will be pushing out the December 2007 dashboard update to Xbox 360 owners. The Xbox Team today has posted the official changelog for the update, so you can see exactly what we’ll be getting.

One of the biggest changes (in my book) is that the 360 now supports MPEG-4 Part 2 video files in AVI containers, which to the rest of us, means DivX (and possibly XviD) formatted movies can now be streamed from your computer or played right from the 360’s HDD. This is a long-awaited change for me, because it means I can now watch reams of Star Trek Voyager DVD rips and other stuff I’ve got in this format, streamed right from my computer. The Korean/Japanese TV shows Apple often downloads are also usually in this format — I wonder how (if) the 360 will handle outboard subtitle files?

For more information about video playback changes in the December 2007 dashboard update, see this post.