News - New focus on Xbox as Entertainment Hub

[HEXUS]

Microsoft strikes Sony's Playstation 3 where it hurts.

Read more.

[abaxas]

"Microsoft strikes Sony's Playstation 3 where it hurts."

Translation...

Microsoft comes to the table late and hopes to pick up some of the scraps.

[shaithis]

My XBox still drowns the sound of my HTPC out.....while the XBox is idling and my HTPC is playing Batman with 2 GFX cards under load....

Which makes it's use as an "entertainments hub" pretty pointless to me.

[.havoc]

Big ol' pile of meh!

Stick a Blu Ray player in it then you can compare it to the PS3.

[cheesemp]

My £90 Sony blu-ray player can do everything list but channel 4 and the voice recognition. To be honest I'm happy to keep using the blu-ray player as I'm not going to be investing in xbox live gold for either of those. I use my xbox less and less these days (and the kinect virtually never) and I can't see this changing that.

[Scribe]

I have to agree with what everyone is saying here (and the new 360 still scratches blooming discs!), though I think the general "Internet TV" offering across any device is pretty weak still against Satellite and Cable with TiVo/Sky+ functionality.

I'm at least pleased to see more and more content build-up on a single device, it makes the future of Internet TV feel promising. I also think if it works well, voice commands could be a real time-saver as opposed to navigating through pages of programming and content with a joypad.

[capt_cornflake]

Such functionality is somewhat in vein if there's little content to search through

Just wondering if voice recognition was used to put that article together?

[crossy]

I have to agree with what everyone is saying here (and the new 360 still scratches blooming discs!), though I think the general "Internet TV" offering across any device is pretty weak still against Satellite and Cable with TiVo/Sky+ functionality. I'm at least pleased to see more and more content build-up on a single device, it makes the future of Internet TV feel promising. I also think if it works well, voice commands could be a real time-saver as opposed to navigating through pages of programming and content with a joypad.

True, true. (Apart from the bit about the XB scratching disks - my "slim" works fine).

I've got TVOD via tablet (although the iPlayer app on Android is atrocious), PC, TV, cable and home theatre. So why exactly would I want to use the XBox to do this?

Hope the Kinect integration does turn out to be voice-driven, not voice+gesture, as the only way I can use gesture with the Kinect (apart from the 1 finger variety) is to move it to another room - usual Kinect failing of needing acres of space to be able to use.

A BluRay add on (cheap) would have been nice though.

Did many people sign up for that Sky TV deal that Microsoft were doing? I've got VM not Sky, so £15pm seemed a hang of a lot of cash for something that I'd only use sporadically.

Never mind "entertainment hub" how about improving the experience for folks who just want to use it to play games on?

[MonkeyL]

An "Entertainment Hub" that's louder than the TV, that doesn't support the vast majority of popular formats.... Good luck with that!

[Scribe]

Just wondering if voice recognition was used to put that article together?

Sorry, misspelt word of the day =P... hmmm... voice recognition for articles... Then again it's not like I can speak and think at the same time, it's why I write

[DDY]

The day console designers build a machine which doesn't stick out like a sore thumb with the rest of my AV equipment is the day I'll think about using one as an entertainment hub.

[vrykyl]

Until it can also stream mkv / xvid etc and supports surround sound audio from network streaming video... THEN we'll talk about it claiming to be an entertainment hub (hugs new wdtv live hub)

[MuscleFlex]

Big ol' pile of meh!

Stick a Blu Ray player in it then you can compare it to the PS3.

true - i agree. they should have paid sony for the rights to distribute bluray and xbox would have been really great.
altho... i really have no idea how to play mkv or HD movies on my xbox.
my ps3 is so easy... just convert my mkv to mpg using some free programs and it plays.
i find the xbox very hard to use.... or maybe i just don't know where to begin (and i don't want to stream from my PC when i have a NAS)

[jnutt]

I stream from my NAS using my XBOX without any problems

[crossy]

i find the xbox very hard to use.... or maybe i just don't know where to begin (and i don't want to stream from my PC when i have a NAS)

I also don't want to stream from the PC when I've got a NAS (in my case a WD MBWE) - mainly down to the fact that the XBox and PC share the same monitor.

Didn't have much of a problem streaming from the MBWE - but you need your NAS to be acting as a media server (DLNA?). If you want to check whether its the files that your using that are the problem you could also bung a couple on a flash drive and plug that in. I certainly remember being able to stream iPod-compatible MP4's to the XBox, (although I'll give that a check after the dashboard update).

You could always post a question on the forums here - there's usually someone with the same setup as you that can help.

[crossy]

Didn't have much of a problem streaming from the MBWE - but you need your NAS to be acting as a media server (DLNA?). I certainly remember being able to stream iPod-compatible MP4's to the XBox, (although I'll give that a check after the dashboard update).

Got the update yesterday and sure enough, it was just a case of going into the video bit and selecting the video player app. I tried this on two XBox slim's and the second one needed 30 seconds or so to figure out that the MBWE NAS was available as a video source.

Oh, and if you're using MP4's then you'll need to download the MP4 update - my first XBox slim just sat there "thinking" the first time I tried, but asked for the update on the second try. The second XBox slim asked for the update straight away.

VERY unsure about the new update - sure there's more features, but I find that the basic ones are now harder to get to. Plus I've got mine setup to login to XBL automatically and this appears to be a bit flaky now, with the machine booting up but needing a manual "connect" order given.