360 Dash Update - End May?

[expletive]

Article on a possible big dashboard update at the end of May. It supposedly will allow 6 simultaneous downloads in the background. Cool.

http://www.pixelgamers.com/xbox360/news/1000609/33/play-while-you-download-coming-to-xbox-live.html

Glad they listened to the feedback and solved the 'concurrent' and 'background' problems all at once.

 

[RavenFox]

Wow thats great news.

 

[Bobbler]

Nice -- that would have been great for around E3 though!

 

[Jon Brittan]

Nice -- that would have been great for around E3 though!

Indeed, but all credit to MS, I've had great download speeds from them the last few days...

Will be great to have simultaneous and background downloading though, I've taken to having my laptop in the lounge and playing Football Manager while I wait for downloads to finish before playing on the 360 again.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Indeed, but all credit to MS, I've had great download speeds from them the last few days...

Will be great to have simultaneous and background downloading though, I've taken to having my laptop in the lounge and playing Football Manager while I wait for downloads to finish before playing on the 360 again.

Ya after that first day, when everything seemed to die, the speeds have been good.

6 simultaneous DL's is good, I just hope they make the resumption more robust as well. If the download can't be completed, resume it automatically till it's done! I don't want to hear about it!

 

[Bobbler]

Ya after that first day, when everything seemed to die, the speeds have been good.

6 simultaneous DL's is good, I just hope they make the resumption more robust as well. If the download can't be completed, resume it automatically till it's done! I don't want to hear about it!

I was actually quite happy they even had a resume... first time a DL of mine got canceled I didn't think they had anything because it didn't make any mention or anything. An auto resume/retry would be handy (especially when you do 6 concurrent and leave it overnight or something). Good news on this update, regardless, if the 6 concurrent/background dl stuff is correct!

 

[RobertR1]

Wow. Nice update. Looks like MS is certainly not being lazy with Live. The marketplace demos have been a blessing. Each night I just download and enjoy!

BTW, demo's look a LOT better if your xbox is set to 1080i rather than 720p.

 

[m4trix]

Wow. Nice update. Looks like MS is certainly not being lazy with Live. The marketplace demos have been a blessing. Each night I just download and enjoy!

BTW, demo's look a LOT better if your xbox is set to 1080i rather than 720p.

huh? What demos and why?

 

[RobertR1]

huh? What demos and why?

I played the Lost Planet Demo and The Moto GP 06 demo last night (off marketplace)and re viewed a bunch of the E3 trailers in 1080i instead of 720p last night. Everything looks a lot more clean and crisp at 1080i. You have to goto "system, display" and force the res. there.

The weird thing was that the screen got darker when I switched to 1080i but I was able to compensate by turning up the contrast on the plasma.

 

[Tap In]

I played the Lost Planet Demo and The Moto GP 06 demo last night (off marketplace)and re viewed a bunch of the E3 trailers in 1080i instead of 720p last night. Everything looks a lot more clean and crisp at 1080i. You have to goto "system, display" and force the res. there.

unless your TV is native 720p

mine upscales all to 1080i, so those settings are better for me too as it allows the Xbox to upscale the image instead of my tv scaler

 

[kyleb]

It just depends on how well your TV handles 720p compared to 1080i and how well your TV handles scaleing to its native resolutions compared to what the 360 does, and with presonal preference weighing as well. Then of couse you can't get a full 60fps out of a 60hz interlaced signal, so with high framerate content that comes into play as well.

 

[Grall]

Everything looks a lot more clean and crisp at 1080i.

The xbox 360 doesn't render internally at 1080i, it merely scales the output framebuffer when you set it to that mode.


If things look better for you in this non-native format, it's because of the peculiarities of your viewing device. I can assure you, on my HDTV I can't see one iota of difference between the two modes.

*G*

 

[[maven]]

It supposedly will allow 6 simultaneous downloads in the background.

It's doing up to 6 queued downloads, only one of which will run at a time.
And IMO, it's not a question of "Thanks, you guys are great, thanks for listening" but more "Why the heck wasn't it in there from the start?"...

 

[Sis]

And IMO, it's not a question of "Thanks, you guys are great, thanks for listening" but more "Why the heck wasn't it in there from the start?"...

Actually, that's an easy question to answer without knowing any details, simply because it applies to all software development: they ran out of time...

 

[NavNucST3]

While they are at it, can I get a one-button "Add to playlist" option, PLEASE, 3 or four menus to add a SINGLE song is a pain. I mean the X-Button isnt even mapped on half the screens in the music player. That just seems like something they could have pulled straight from XBMC, where it used the Y-Button to add to a playlist, all from one screen. Guess they just want me to do all the playlists from the MCE...

 

[expletive]

It's doing up to 6 queued downloads, only one of which will run at a time.
And IMO, it's not a question of "Thanks, you guys are great, thanks for listening" but more "Why the heck wasn't it in there from the start?"...

I see where the articale says 'parallel' but now that you mention it, I would actually prefer it to work in serial. That would get the first piece of content on your HD quicker, since youre focusing all the available bandwidth (on both sides) on getting one download at a time instead of all simultaneous. In theory you would have more stuff available to you quicker this way, even though the entire operation would finish at about the same time.

 

[ERP]

The xbox 360 doesn't render internally at 1080i, it merely scales the output framebuffer when you set it to that mode.


If things look better for you in this non-native format, it's because of the peculiarities of your viewing device. I can assure you, on my HDTV I can't see one iota of difference between the two modes.

*G*

The Xbox 360 can certainly render internally at 1080i, though no games I know of do.
I'm pretty sure that if you set it to 1080i the Dashboard will be rendered at that resolution.

 

[kyleb]

Right, but RobertR1 was talking about playing games and watching movies, all of which are natively 720p.

 

[Rockster]

College Hoops 2k6, Fight Night Round 3, Far Cry Instincts, MLB 2k6, and TopSpin 2 claim to render at 1080i according to XBox.com.

 

[Grall]

I'm pretty sure that if you set it to 1080i the Dashboard will be rendered at that resolution.

Probably yes, but a downloaded movie won't suddenly turn into 1080i source material just because I change one setting in the dash config menu...


*G*