{"id":333,"date":"2008-11-22T15:57:37","date_gmt":"2008-11-22T20:57:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/?p=333"},"modified":"2008-11-22T15:57:37","modified_gmt":"2008-11-22T20:57:37","slug":"new-xble-tversity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/?p=333","title":{"rendered":"New XBLE + TVersity"},"content":{"rendered":"

I grabbed the new Xbox Live Experience (XBLE) this Wednesday fairly late.\u00a0 I wanted to avoid the potential problems that may crop up with billions of Xboxes try downloading at once or if there were any major bugs to avoid it until they were fixed.\u00a0 Fortunately, it looks like Microsoft did a great job with distribution and the only bug I know of is some units won’t play sound when hooked up through HDMI which doesn’t concern my unit at home.\u00a0 I take an HDMI cable to travel with my Xbox though so I’m not sure if it affects me when I’m at my parent’s house or at a friend’s playing Rock Band.<\/p>\n

I have to say, I enjoyed the blades a bit more, there’s two menu options that feel completely useless and can clutter up the new menu system.\u00a0 You can get rid of one, but you still have to deal with the other which is basically just XBL online video stuff.\u00a0 I was greeted with the avatar creation system and made a fairly close looking guy to myself.\u00a0 It felt very mii-ish but had a bit more customization.\u00a0 No chance to see what the point of the avatar is yet since I don’t own any games that use them, but maybe they’ll be cool.<\/p>\n

I installed Rock Band 2 to the hard drive.\u00a0 It takes a bit.\u00a0 I loaded it up and didn’t notice any phenomenal loading time difference.\u00a0 I won’t say I didn’t notice any difference, it did seem a bit faster, but it won’t make the songs load up in 2 seconds or anything.\u00a0 I did notice that the Xbox itself is very quiet, which is a huge plus when it used to be an annoying background noise.<\/p>\n

Now based on this great Lifehacker article<\/a> I installed TVersity onto my desktop and was able to stream all my video files except for .mkv extensions without any trouble.\u00a0 I’m sure there’s a way to get those to stream but I haven’t messed with it yet, either way, I’m loving the new streaming options.\u00a0 I even got some classic Star Trek up on the TV.<\/p>\n

There’s one glaring issue with the Xbox and it’s unrelated to any new change and probably won’t affect people with new widescreen TVs.\u00a0 But I have an old 4:3 HDTV.\u00a0 So the Xbox setting for high def pushes it to 1080i mode which is fine, but when displaying content in 4:3 it should revert to 480p automatically like my DVD player does.\u00a0 Now when watching 4:3 content, I get in in this centered little window on my TV and it’s annoying to manually switch.<\/p>\n

Overall, the changes are kinda minimal for such a long wait for this update.\u00a0 The best feature is installing to HD, but some games are hit and miss.\u00a0 Halo 3 doesn’t like being installed for instance by design.\u00a0 I’m dying to know how good the Netflix thing is because I kind of want to dumb regular cable for Netflix since I don’t end up watching a lot of TV anymore.\u00a0 There are some things that I might really have a hard time not occasionally watching (Adult Swim\/Globe Trekker\/Food Network) so it’s a hard decision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I grabbed the new Xbox Live Experience (XBLE) this Wednesday fairly late.\u00a0 I wanted to avoid the potential problems that may crop up with billions of Xboxes try downloading at once or if there were any major bugs to avoid it until they were fixed.\u00a0 Fortunately, it looks like Microsoft did a great job with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=333"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":334,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions\/334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}