Consoles & Propoganda

The only way to access your own videos with 360 is using media center, however it works fairly well. Once you set up Transcode360, you can browse all the video's on your PC and playback any format. Since all me media resides on the PC anyways, I don't have the desire to transfer stuff over to the 360, the only case I'd like to do it, is if I was going ona trip and wanted to bring some movies.

Admittedly, the interface is a little slow, and currently I use my Xbox1 with XBMC which is far superior, but the functionality is still there and it works fine. Also, I hear with Vista it's a much better/faster experience.

The PVR functionality is great as well as long as you have Media Center, I'd say 50% of the time my 360 is on, I'm using it as a PVR.

 

Just saw this, has a little relevance here, it seems IPTV/VOD services are not far away for 360:

 

I wouldn't say that's the only way. You can use CDs, external harddrives, memory sticks, and you can even stream all your media (including videos now) without Windows Media Center. I'm a mac user half the time, so I use connect360 to stream media. You can use windows media player 11 on windows XP to do the same (and for free).

 

I just installed ORB this morning (www.orb.com) and it basically provides the 360 with video streaming of all movie formats by transcoding on the fly. IMO it's a much smoother experience than the other tools out there that offer similar functionality (TVersity, Transcode360, etc).

The only real downer is it chews your PC's CPU time, rather than using the tri-core setup in the bloody box

Check it out.

 

Thanks, I've been meaning to check ORB out, especially now that I want to try streaming media to my PS3 as well.

 

There is a All-in-One media player for music (with an award winning visualization program) picture viewer with slide show features and video player for viewing your vid files. You can use the controller with cool tricks or either of the Remote controls (small one came with launch) or the large media one (sold separately) that I got with my HD DVD player. Logitech also makes an Xbox 360 Harmony remote.

I have WMP11 installed on my PC and over the network the 360 simply connects to my PC and plays all of my video clips, pictures and music. (as noted above, some use other software to connect which allows some additional codecs). WMP11 does not have to be running. So any new files that are added to my PC's HDD are automatically available through the X360.

I can also attach an MP3 player, camera or iPod via USB port to play and view as well as a USB HDD (read not write). Yes you can copy music etc directly over to the console (but i have no need since they all reside on my PCs 320 GB of space ). Yes Xbox live saves a record of all of your purchases over the marketplace. It's attached to your profile so even if you lose everything when you log back in under your account, you can recover everything.

Not to mention full TV shows and feature films, (some in 720p HiDef) comedy shows etc are available for purchase/rent over the marketplace. and IPTV on the Horizon.

It's a fully featured playback system. They are not missing a trick and as NavNucST3 said, it's been doing most of this stuff since 2005.

this post explains some of the other lesser known features

including Custom soundtracks IN all games...

 

Thanks! is it Windows/Microsoft codecs only? or does it support other stuff for example MPEG2. My experience with Media Center PC´s is pretty much as bad as it gets, maybe it´s because i live in the world of PAL or maybe it´s the few PC´s i have tried that sucked. Nevertheless, having to run a PC besides my console is a no deal, no way thing, so the USB solution would be the solution for me, but i never heard it was possible, i guess i read PC forums to much

 

Ah the joy of semantics... don't ever change B3D!

Reflecting back, the TFLOPs number actually was something discussed in Sony's vision (and patents) for the Broadband Engine and was subsequently carried forth by a number of vocal individuals (viral marketers?). I had stated at the time that MS had just cashed in on the BE hype brewing in cyber space with a pre-emptive strike. You can see from that post how I pretty accurately predicted how we would be entagled in a web of near useless numbers for well over a year. Anyhow, MS and Sony had done a lot of jockeying for position of mindshare pre-launch and that the designs also took some of this into consideration.

Where were you when we were hearing all the doom and gloom about 1MB of cache

Every time?

If you have a strict time budget for developing a product could you not envision scenarios where being more difficult to program for makes the chip less superior? The chips have a context, game development, that is pretty important to whether they are better or not at what tasks and overall. And developers do NOT agree on this topic (just take a look at a respected developer talking about moving over large amounts of performance unsensative code and moving it to a managed code framework for ease of access).

In a utopian world where you can build your code from the ground up and have as much time as possible to test new approaches to solving software issues to get the best performance out of your processer Cell would win pretty easily. It is, afterall, 50% larger and has some peak performance metrics that double that of Xenon and when you create ways to leverage the design's architectural strengths (very, very fast local store; robust internal bus; more processors) it could be even more. But most developers are not starting at step 1, they do have a host of staff they need to educate (and some, babysit), and are under difficult time and expense guidelines. They cannot stop and take an extra 6 months to discover a new technique to do AI because their learned methods is not friendly with the SPEs.

This is the problem with Cell from a market standpoint. If MS had released in 2006 and Sony had released in 2005 and had already accelerated their investment in development things could be substantially different (see: PS2). One of the problems developers are facing is increasing complexity of their games (as well as increased budgets and dev cycles), but in the same breath they are also facing more complex hard designs that require additional work and management to extract performance. Both consoles face this problem, yet Cell is going against the flow in regards to where the market had been as well as its competition (PC, 360) who were to market quicker. With much of the advanced middleware coming to the market from the PC intentioanlly departing from that model had a high risk/reward.

In theory it is easy to ignore these elements of the market, but what is "superior" is what gives returns in the market where the competition is occuring. The ceiling is high for Cell, higher than Xenon, but extracting Xenon level performance in a game that has many various systems running that all take optimization the question is how long will it take before the median game reaches and then exceeds Xenon in performance?

IMO one of the reasons the SPE design was chosen was because it would make porting the code to other systems (360, Wii, PC) nearly impossible. At the time, with Sony's absolute market dominance, this seemed like an excellent move to a) leave significant performance headroom for a long lifecycle at an affordable priceerformance point and b) keep the competition at bay. But the market has not quite shaped up this way, partly due to the increasing complexity of games and designs and the time and fiscal requirements involved. Getting performance now using the tools and staff and methods that have proven to be effective and not re-inventing the wheel (to get comparable performance) less where necessary is an important aspect of a designs strength and "superiority". It is easy to look at the flops or the advantages of an architecture, but it needs to be put in the context of a market.

Right now whether you like Cell better or not really depends on if you are 1st party or 3rd party, what are your design and performance limitations, and your resources. Whether this will change in the future (probably so, with movement toward Cell) and how much is really up in the air and will be dictated strongly by the market. If 2007 sees significant growth disparity in the console marketshare (based on the software lineups and retail prices I think it will) I think we will see developers putting a fair amount of effort in trying to solve performance issues on Xenon. I think Xenon has a fair amount of overhead for performance bound situations where the time saved from not optimizing huge amounts of code and selecting key performance bottlenecks could have positive results. But I think it all comes down to what you are doing and the resources you have to accomplish your task.

IMO What is superior is the one that lets you meet your goals within your constraints and resources. In that framework I cannot give the same unequivicol affirmation because it seems the answer really is, "It depends". But in theory, yes, you are correct.

 

Unless there's a prominent case you can think of where game-centric code could not be re-architected to run more quickly on the Cell, well... I mean I've got to stick with every time here.

Joshua you said it right when you brought up B3D and semantics. When I said Cell was superior, I meant from a performance potential standpoint, and was in an argument debating "general purpose" code and the myth surrounding it. Now I've already said several times in this thread and the DMC4 thread before it that programming for Cell is not a vacation for devs, and that said potential lies at the end of a long trek. If one were to be judging superiority in terms of approachability, then the XeCPU is the superior processor. At the same though, as the years go by and the Cell codebase and tools mature, the XeCPUs superiority in the area will diminish to an extent.

'Better,' like 'superior' is one of those words that's reliant on the reader to interpret and can have a couple of different meanings - but for the sake of contrasting here, I would say that Cell will *always* be the better option of the two given unlimited budgets, time, resources, etc... now that is obviously not reality. So given the context of the real-world, which changes situation to situation, I'll readily grant you that Cell is not always the more practical solution between the two. In terms of the dev you mention though, care to point to a thread or quote? I think I know who it is, and have a quote of theirs I'm eager to follow up with.

And please do remember, I'm all CPU all the time in this conversation, rather than platform vs platfrom. I think the platforms are much more on even footing when viewed holistically than are the processors; but then this conversation arose from my discussing the future gameplay potential of Cell, rather than graphics or any other such thing.

There ya go, that's what I'm saying.

I really don't think this was a consideration at all; I think it was all on the level in order to gain maximum performance potential. And I'm not saying that's what they did or did not achieve, but I just don't think there was an agenda there other than to 'win.'

I don't know, I think most devs who've actually worked with Cell just outright like it; I haven't seen any comments to the contrary at least outside of mass-media interviews. I think rather that in spite of the romance and potential associated with Cell, other factors come together to have some devs favor 360 over PS3 as platforms.

Obviously my statements above don't and can't apply to 100% of devs that have worked with Cell, but seemingly enough so that I'm comfortable making it.

See, this just gets to the ways in which you're using superior vs how I have been; at no point have I been discussing game development, but game potential. I agree with you on the real world factors that set the dynamic - but if MajorNelson had been approaching the two architecturesfrom an economic standpoint rather than a pseudo-science standpoint (like he was), hell I wouldn't have argued one bit.

 

To anyone who has a PC and hasn't checked out Orb yet I highly recommend it. Aside from the mentioned ability to stream media to a 360 you can actually stream media to a remote PC by signing into a gateway web site and I can even stream to my cell phone. It's a phenomenally useful program.

 

Well, the primary valid argument about doom and gloom over 1 MB of cache is the simultaneous data dependencies over multiple threads that could mean data lines get evicted by the demands of one thread that would later be needed by another active thread, and then every thread suffers more misses for it. Yeah, there's an element of chance here, but the rule of thumb is that chance is never in your favor.

As the extracted parallelism grows, that's really where it will start to creep its ugly head, really. Now I'm curious what else people were thinking in this "doom and gloom" stuff you speak of.

 

Thanks for the feedback SMM. To generalize, it has been frequently noted that Xenon (and the Cell PPU to a degree) have significantly less cache than their PC counterparts and that this could pose serious performance issues, especially Xenon which would have less than 512KB per core (compared to something like C2D with 2MB per core). IMO this is an oversymplified arguement and ignores the differences in task and market but the amount of cache, specifically the lack thereof, has been a point mentioned on the forums quite often over the last couple years. Coming from the PC background I can remember game scenarios where cache was less important than in a mainstream application, e.g. I remember Quake 2 running great on Celerons without cache because the type of stuff the game was doing wasn't very cache dependant. I am only an arm chair commentator though, the impact of the lack of cache is something developers can inform us on and will be seen in the games.

 

Regarding the P2 vs Celeron big cache vs little cache scenario. There were several other factors in play. The P2 had 512KB of L2 cache, but it was running at half the CPU's clock rate. While the Celeron had only 128KB if L2 but it was running at full speed.

People found that the full speed caches found on the Celeron, combined with the fact it was a very good overclocker compared to the P2, made them execlent gaming CPUs.

But these were CPUs only running at around 400mhz. Obviously the data requirments for such a chip will be totaly different from a multiprocessor & SMT CPU with 128bit SIMD running at 3.2Ghz. The latter will be a far greater consumer of data

 

That is the celeron 300a you're speaking of. The first versions had literally no l2 cache. -fyi

/offtopic

To get back on topic for this discussion I still believe the MN doc though misleading, in context was a lot less harmful and misleading/untruthful than the e3 fiasco (in whole) and in general I much prefer the lesser of two evils (MS) in this regard. IMO

Having said that, it would be great if honesty were the first priority of marketing and selling these consoles.

/dream

 

Less evil in what way? Models on the front row clapping on cue, boasting about performance that doesn´t matter in 3D games, a console that is build like shit and not admitting it (not rly), and a company with a history of buying markets and then killing everything that resembles innovation only to milk it dry, dead and grey and on the side is slowly killing PC gaming. Or Sony a company that seems more curious and innovative than alot of "big firms", and yes crazy arrogant and downright stupid sometimes. If Microsoft wins our kids will pay

EDIT: Your signature is btw a good example of this Console War, something he never said or was meant to be understood that way makes it into a sig "for great justice". Irony?

 

Less evil in the specific example I gave. Setting the tone for what to expect of these consoles. I think MS did a great job of explaining where they were going with the console and what it would be capable of producing. This is all that matters to the general consumer. Sony on the other hand ... I won't get into specifics to avoid a certain hot topic but you all know exactly what I'm talking about. Those vids were used to visually represent an ideal that was the exclamaition point on the presentation of numbers and stats which were designed to paint a clear picture of deception.

Regarding my sig, both are from the horses mouth. Sorry if the truth hurts.

 

You want to read it that way and you do know it wasn´t meant that way (i hope).

Cheap labour is not cheap people. Your the one calling US people cheap not the Sony guy.

You are actually the guy he is talking about:

 

Ok and what relevence did that statement have to do with the Euro ps3 launch? Were they explaining their reasoning to manufacture the ps3 in NA instead of EU?

...

 

Oops sorry mate i thought you read the interview:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=23722

It´s basicly meant as an excuse for the "high price" of the PS3 compared to the US price, excuse as in explanation, i think this board had a lenghty and more healthy discussion about that, than the out of context quote produced on other boards. There is a valid point somewhere, how can it be that 100$ can make the PS3 "omg expensive sony sucks lol" in the US, while in my country the PS3 was sold at some 150 dollars under the retail price because of competition (between the retailers).

 

I did read the interview and again the relevence to cheap labor means what exactly? They aren't building the ps3 here or in EU, so "cheap labor" is irrelevant to the Euro Launch.