360 comes with pre-loaded content?

[EndR]

Audio and video will ship on Xbox 360 drive; 23 minute game trailer reel included

The Xbox 360 will ship in the UK with over 100 minutes of audio and video already on the system's hard drive, it has emerged, after Microsoft submitted the planned content to the British Board of Film Certification to be rated.

The content, which has been passed without cuts by the BBFC, consists of 22 separate files - the majority of which are between three and five minutes long, and appear to be music videos or movie clips, with titles such as "PUNK ROCK SUPERSTAR.WMA" and "1ST_TITANICTESTSEQUENCE_SINKING_8MBPS.WMV".

However, one stand-out piece of content is a 22 minutes 59 second long item described as "DVD OF GAME", which seems likely to be a trailer reel for upcoming Xbox 360 games.

The fact that the Xbox 360 ships with video and audio content pre-loaded is further proof of Microsoft's commitment to pushing the console as a multimedia platform for the living room rather than simply as a games device.

It's expected that users will be able to download multimedia content - as well as things like game demos and add-ons - through retail systems on the Xbox Live service, and Microsoft is thought to see Xbox 360 as central to its ambitions in the digital video and audio space - where competitor Apple has a strong first-mover advantage thanks to the success of iPod and the iTunes Music Store.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=1032

 

[Shifty Geezer]

How much of that 20 GB HDD is 23 mins gonna take up? I'd have thought a DVD of content more economical (must be easier to print DVDS than add content to an HDD for every HDD) and the inbuilt HDD doesn't have enough room to really work as a multimedia platform.

:?

It is 20 gigs isn't it?

 

[pc999]

It need to come with the OS anyway, so maybe the DVD would be pricier.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

True. If they're writing to HDDs already, may as well stick on some content. I know they do on Windows despite people never even wanting to listen to those MIDIs or watching demo movies!

 

[London Geezer]

As long as it's all removable, i don't care what they put in there.

 

[Platon]

Sounds cool, although what I really really want is to be able to download demos, I do't get why this hasn't been done before. This will be great for people that have no access to OXM or don't care to pay for a mag only for the demos...

 

[typoEDR]

Actually, that would be a big kicker if they put playable demos on the HDD...

 

[EndR]

YOu WILL be able to download playable demos of games. MS has made some strategic alliances regarding this, one with a company called Lightspeed (IIRC).

So, atleast with 360, you will be able to download playable demos of games to come..

 

[jvd]

Well using the xbox 360 trailers in hd its about 100 megs for 1 min of film at 720p 60fps .

Anyway the xbox 360 should also come with games like texas holdem and other little games installed also

 

[Shifty Geezer]

10% taken up with preinstalled content! Hope it's easy to delete after watching!

BTW : Anyone know what inteface XB360 has for accessing content. Presumably PS3 will go with the XMB (cross media bar) like PSP and Sony TVs. Does XB360 have a custom interface or Windows Media Edition or something?

 

[pc999]

Anyway the xbox 360 should also come with games like texas holdem and other little games installed also

That would be very nice.

 

[3roxor]

Anyway the xbox 360 should also come with games like texas holdem and other little games installed also

And the reason you can't download texas holdem type games is.. The controller isn't usefull for those type of games anyway.

 

[Tap In]

Anyway the xbox 360 should also come with games like texas holdem and other little games installed also

And the reason you can't download texas holdem type games is.. The controller isn't usefull for those type of games anyway.

MS has said that free simplistic games like these would be available for download also (part of the free silver LIVE plan I believe)

Not sure what you're trying to get at with the controller comment, don't see a problem with it. Programmers are smart, they'll make it work.

 

[Powderkeg]

Well using the xbox 360 trailers in hd its about 100 megs for 1 min of film at 720p 60fps .

Using the HD WMV's on Microsoft's site as reference, you can get 2:02 of 720p video in only 98MB.

 

[Stratowagon]

Using the HD WMV's on Microsoft's site as reference, you can get 2:02 of 720p video in only 98MB.

The videos at that site are 1280x720 (720p) but only 30fps. The original DOA4 trailer from E3 in high-res form was 960x540 at 60fps, and it was 482MB, or about 90-100MB per minute.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

The videos at that site are 1280x720 (720p) but only 30fps. The original DOA4 trailer from E3 in high-res form was 960x540 at 60fps, and it was 482MB, or about 90-100MB per minute.

Why would you want to encode video at 60 fps? I understand Itagaki's point that the character movements in DOA are too fast for even 60 fps to fully encode everything, but if you dump out 120 fps frame captures, blend every 4 frames for motion blur, you can encode at 30 fps and not actually lose visual cues for the motion. I'm not entirely sure what you'd have to gain by encoding progressive scan 60 fps video other than the fact that it will just eat up disk space.

However, I do think that the HD WMVs on Microsoft's site are not good examples to draw from. They're probably cherry-picked examples (not that it's something surprising). I believe that on standard corpus tests, it never once outdid MPEG-4 in quality/bitrate, though it certainly came pretty close.

 

[PC-Engine]

You can tell a differnce between 30fps and 60fps. Some video cameras can record at 60fps and it's noticable.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

You can tell a differnce between 30fps and 60fps. Some video cameras can record at 60fps and it's noticable.

Sure... if you have an interlaced video mode that will actually scan the fields to render at 60 Hz. If not for that, you wouldn't notice 60 fps in a console game played on an ordinary TV (half the frames would be dropped)... With an interlaced scan mode, you'll at least get half your scanlines from a new frame each time, so the motion will look smoother. I don't follow HD as well as people who know what money looks like, but I don't think there are 60 fps progressive scan modes.

People make the assumption that framerate and smoothness are inherently linked, which isn't really true. Smoothness has more to do with the amount of information that is gathered by the eye, and the problem with in-game graphics is that a given frame only has information about position and not motion.

 

[PC-Engine]

You can tell a differnce between 30fps and 60fps. Some video cameras can record at 60fps and it's noticable.

Sure... if you have an interlaced video mode that will actually scan the fields to render at 60 Hz. If not for that, you wouldn't notice 60 fps in a console game played on an ordinary TV (half the frames would be dropped)... With an interlaced scan mode, you'll at least get half your scanlines from a new frame each time, so the motion will look smoother. I don't follow HD as well as people who know what money looks like, but I don't think there are 60 fps progressive scan modes.

People make the assumption that framerate and smoothness are inherently linked, which isn't really true. Smoothness has more to do with the amount of information that is gathered by the eye, and the problem with in-game graphics is that a given frame only has information about position and not motion.

I think many people will agree that you can tell the differnce between 60fps games and 30fps games even on interlaced tvs...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I don't follow HD as well as people who know what money looks like, but I don't think there are 60 fps progressive scan modes.

I was of the impression HDTV was 60 fps, hence the arguments over PS3's 1080 output (is it 30 or 60 fps?). Certainly from what little I've gleaned 720p should be a full screen refresh every 1/60th of a second. I think the same is true of 480p.