Xbox 360 Fall 2007 Dashboard update hands-on

What, you didn't wait up all night to play around with Microsoft's Xbox 360 Fall 2007 Dashboard update? Ok, fine, we're just that geeky, but we feel vindicated: this is hands down our favorite 360 update thus far. And not just because we can finally watch DivX and Xvid on our 360. The best new bits (and other notes):

• Um, did we mention DivX / XviD support? For free? Oh, we did. Well, we're still reeling. (Yep, we successfully tested both codecs using .divx and .avi files.)
• Enhanced profiles is really exciting; you have to opt out of everyone being able to view your friends list, but given the permissions system Live is based on, that's not such a big deal. Browsing friends' friends lists adds a whole new layer. Microsoft, care to bump us up past 100 Live friends now?
• IPTV support is included! Unfortunately, you are still dependent on your service provider to flip the switch, so don't expect to be able to just start watching / recording shows to your 360. (Interface shots here, from way back when.)
• Family timers lets you specify the number of playable hours daily and weekly. For instance, you can enable between 15 minutes and 24 hours of daily play time (in 15 minute increments). We're not sure how this works if you're watching IPTV, though, although we presume the system is smart enough to know the difference between gaming and playing back media.
  
• Microsoft added its increasingly pervasive twist interface all over the place, including Xbox Live downloads, the media interface, etc. Browsing just about everything on the 360 just got way easier.
• Inside Xbox newsletter / feed is now available from the home blade, helping highlight new content and features. We kind of wish this wasn't so front and center though -- really, how often are you going to use this?

Gallery: Xbox 360 Fall 2007 Dashboard update hands-on

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[Adam B @ Dec 4th 2007 7:29AM]

All around solid update. I noticed that the blades move juch quicker on the dashboard, and windows open/close faster as well.

[a ham sandwich @ Dec 4th 2007 9:46AM]

i agree.

ryan, could we get a post that goes a little more in depth about the iptv function? ie. what providers, how much it costs, what channels, what's hd or not, etc. if that information is available.

[muddyh2o @ Dec 4th 2007 2:18PM]

yes please. can any mortals use it, or is it only for the three people on the planet who have uverse or some strange swisscom setup in geneva

[DMG @ Dec 4th 2007 4:31PM]

does this hurt my modded xbox 360?

[JamesonL @ Dec 4th 2007 7:31AM]

PS3 DIVX support announced on Nov 13th or there abouts...Still waiting...tick tock..MS dont announce anything and just add it on a whim. Come on Sony this is a joke..

[Scooby Doo @ Dec 4th 2007 7:50AM]

WAITB3YOND

[Jon @ Dec 4th 2007 8:15AM]

WHAT ?? you mean my PS3 is more then a Blu Ray player .. thats nuts .. Oh silly me it still is ONLY a Blu Ray player



(Well ratchet and Clank was fun)

[Andir3.0 @ Dec 4th 2007 11:58AM]

So you like being left in the dark about upcoming changes?

[Matthew @ Dec 4th 2007 3:52PM]

Microsoft was talking about divx support two years ago, they didn't just decide to add it on a whim.

[Tony Newton @ Dec 4th 2007 7:36AM]

Do these dashboard updates get released at the same time in the UK?

[doublej @ Dec 4th 2007 7:36AM]

There's no DivX support.

[Murdarer @ Dec 4th 2007 7:41AM]

There's no ra-ra DivX(tm) support but there's support for the fundamental decode algorithms DivX is based on.

[Jonathan @ Dec 6th 2007 7:55AM]

There was something I read about it only working with divx ver 5.0. How do I determine what version of divx my files were created with?

I have a couple hundred gigs of tv shows and this divx support is *the* factor in getting xbox 360 under my tree this year.... *if* they'll work.

[Jon @ Dec 4th 2007 8:13AM]

All my files played great , tested about 10 of them .. new player controls work perfect and screen resizing is great

[doublej @ Dec 4th 2007 8:52AM]

I can play any from my MCE

[Erwos @ Dec 4th 2007 9:03AM]

It doesn't support the new interactivity features and subtitles found in DivX 6. The video/audio will play fine.

[RyanTV @ Dec 4th 2007 9:09AM]

I tested both xvid and divx files this morning and neither worked for me. They played on my Vista PC under Media Center, but would not play on the xbox at all. told me that the media file was unsupported.

[Jon @ Dec 4th 2007 9:15AM]

You cant use MCE for Divx (Not yet,I hope they will add a update) you use the 360 Video Blade and hit X and you can access your PC

[jrb @ Dec 4th 2007 9:34AM]

i believe anything post divx v5 should work, but an assumption here is that will have to be a file which adheres to the standard profiles used in divx and xvid. Will have to do some testing here.

in response to the article's increase of 100 friends. After listening to a major nelson podcast this morning (one of the live 5 year interviews), the reason explained was purely for backwards compatibility. If it weren't for this the limit could be upped without issue, but xbox1 games have 100 hard coded in to them.. they are looking at ways of making it work by filtering out the top 100 friends from your list.. but no concrete news on when / if this would ever go live.

[RyanTV @ Dec 4th 2007 10:16AM]

do you need to set up a share in any specific manner on a Vista (ultimate if that matters) PC? Do you have to add a library into Media Player or just set up a shared video folder? can you run it from a NAS?

[Dan_C @ Dec 4th 2007 10:25AM]

Everything you would want to know about video playback with this update is described here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2007/11/30/december-2007-video-playback-faq.aspx

[rv @ Dec 4th 2007 2:06PM]

Unrelated, but all the torrent sites have hd movies in mkv format. Which means no hd transformers for me :(

[Matt @ Dec 4th 2007 2:55PM]

It supports H.264, just not the MKV container. I'm sure there are programs out there that will convert it to MP4 for you.

[rv @ Dec 4th 2007 3:28PM]

I know, but converting 8gb of video wil not go well for my pc. Also, some video quality will be lost, so I don't really see the point...

[RazorD @ Dec 4th 2007 7:37AM]

Anyone see the Xbox Live Originals games yet? :(

Not available here in the UK... yet :(

[Rich @ Dec 4th 2007 8:29AM]

Why bother with the Originals? You can buy Halo 2 brand new on physical media for £3 less than the download. The downloadable versions are exactly the same as the original versions - no extra native 720P support, no achievements, etc.

[RazorD @ Dec 4th 2007 8:31AM]

I've got Halo - Its Psychonaught's i've been trying to find for the last few months :D And - the games arent shown in the Xbox Originals bladey-thing yet, but are in the marketplace all content thing.

[Adam @ Dec 4th 2007 8:47AM]

I'm assuming the xbox originals and European/Canadian Vid Marketplace will come over next few weeks, if they started all these download services at the same time as a major dashboard update I'm pretty sure their servers would die...

[Xabra @ Dec 4th 2007 9:10AM]

Got the update in Switzerland 5 minutes ago ... sweet !

-xabra

[RyanTV @ Dec 4th 2007 9:13AM]

why would you buy them? because they play directly off your hard drive instead of being played off a DVD. Less noise and quicker load times.

do you need other reasons?

[Billy @ Dec 4th 2007 9:55AM]

Ryan, I'd also add that it's convenient as fuck to have them download and be able to play them instantly. It's worth a few bucks for not having to go to god damn GameSlop.

[xbit @ Dec 4th 2007 6:31PM]

So, you've got:

+ Quicker load times
+ Don't have to swap discs

But you've got to factor that against:

- More expensive
- No physical manual
- Can't sell it on when you're finished with it
- Can't lend it to your friends
- Uses up valuable HDD space

I'll take it on physical media, thanks, just like I will with music.

[Penguin Warlord @ Dec 4th 2007 7:49AM]

Still no int'l video marketplace, atleast here in Canada but Xvid seems to be working perfectly.

[Thomas @ Dec 4th 2007 8:29AM]

Why oh why oh why do they keep adding all this other stuff, but STILL no 16:10 monitor support. It would be so easy... just two little black bars. Really, this is getting ridiculous for the loads of us (especially people in college like I am) who are playing through the VGA cable on 16:10 wide monitors and have to deal with a forever-vertically-stretched picture...

[Mike Botros @ Dec 4th 2007 9:28AM]

Have you checked if your monitor has a dot-by-dot or 1:1 setting, so that if you're getting a 1920x1080 signal it will not use the other 120 lines?

[Thomas @ Dec 4th 2007 5:39PM]

Mike...
I have a Samsung SyncMaster 223BW. Somehow I've never heard of a dot-by-dot or 1:1 setting (I googled it and didn't see anything helpful) but if you'd tell me how to find out I would REALLY appreciate it. Thanks for the tip...

[doublej @ Dec 4th 2007 8:36AM]

So - is anyone playing DivX from there PC on the Xbox ???

[Red Alert @ Dec 4th 2007 8:44AM]

Yes Divx works great. Tried about 6 videos this morning, all worked. I knew there was a reason I started a movie vault a couple years ago. Man, life is good.

[bob e @ Dec 4th 2007 8:43AM]

The software also makes recommendations based on what I have viewed similar to Amazon.com and I notice it lets me know when I have expired content filling up my hard drive.

Nice touch!

[doublej @ Dec 4th 2007 8:55AM]

found this. go to the table at point 10.

http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/

arrrrggghhhhhhhggghhhhhhgghh

For reasons best known to themselves, Media Centre is ignored.

Anyone know why ?

[Victor @ Dec 4th 2007 9:00AM]

so no mce support for divx? i was hoping i could dump transcode 360... i guess not yet.

[Erwos @ Dec 4th 2007 9:05AM]

They've been hinting to some sort of news at CES in January. Still, the community is really starting to get demoralized that a console's secondary media playback functionality is actually better than WVMC's.

The funny part is, if they got DVD streaming and better codec support going, they'd have a really compelling product again. So close, so far.

[gossbkups @ Dec 4th 2007 9:01AM]

So is the Divx support only for streaming or right off the disc?

[disciple83 @ Dec 4th 2007 9:19AM]

As of this morning, after I updated, when i went to stream my divx .avi files through the MCE extender, playback is still non-functional due to missing codecs.

[ColonelSmith @ Dec 4th 2007 9:25AM]

Yeah, they would have to update the MCE to allow playback. But I'm fine with just playing them from the dashboard for now.

[Jonathan Bergeron @ Dec 4th 2007 9:29AM]

So I got a question. What is DivX / XviD and why is it so imperative to have support for it? Are those formats just a flashier version of mpeg?

[Tommy J?nsen @ Dec 4th 2007 9:54AM]

Good question! The reason that people want DivX support is, that they usually have most of their content in DivX anyway, and so, thay won't have to transcode all their content for it to play back on the 360...

What they don't realize is, that a lot of their content is not using standard profiles, so it's hit'n'miss what files will play and which won't.

DivX and Xvid are older versions of what is now effectively MP4 (H.264, VC1). But they are more advanced and better than MPEG1 and 2.

[Neeko @ Dec 4th 2007 9:53AM]

Divx/Avi are the more widely used formats for Video . Basicallyt any video you DL will be in that format meaning you can now use your 360 as a true media player.

[Penguin Warlord @ Dec 4th 2007 4:39PM]

Let's be honest here. The beauty of DivX / Xvid is that it creates a much smaller file size while not greatly reducing quality (i.e. most pirated movies are in this format).

[Jonathan Bergeron @ Dec 4th 2007 9:36AM]

Why would you need more than 100 Live friends? Does engadget have a thing about socializing face to face with people? Put down the controllers people and go outside. There's a big beautiful world outside your doors.