News & Rumors: Xbox One (codename Durango)

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http://news.xbox.com/2013/08/xbox-one-audio

Thanks to integration with Skype’s audio codec, which has a proven track record of high-quality voice through billions of hours of use within Skype, as well as dedicated audio processing (for Xbox One conversations via Skype and multiplayer party chats), Xbox One offers higher quality voice chat with the Xbox One Chat Headset compared to Xbox 360—whether you’re chatting in-game or through party chat with Skype on Xbox One.
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But the improvements don’t stop there. The Xbox One Wireless Controller’s new expansion port dramatically expands the data transfer rate between the controller and console. Combined with Skype’s audio codec, this enables crystal-clear digital audio with the Xbox One Chat Headset, both capturing and rendering speech at 24 KHz PCM, which is triple the rendering sample rate and a 50 percent capture rate improvement over Xbox 360 headsets. And, as we shared before, the Xbox One Chat Headset comes with every Xbox One console
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There are also examples comparing Xbox One's and Xbox 360's chat audio quality. Pretty neat stuff.
 
Deviousb33r said:
http://news.xbox.com/2013/08/xbox-one-audio





There are also examples comparing Xbox One's and Xbox 360's chat audio quality. Pretty neat stuff.
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Here is another take at the news.

http://majornelson.com/2013/08/29/x...hardware-improvements-and-skypes-audio-codec/

In this link I can listen to the audio clips -unlike in the xbox.com link (must note that I am using IE11 beta with Protected Mode on) where the soundcloud player doesn't appear-, and as Rangers pointed out already the difference is huge.

They had improved the audio quality of the voice chat time ago on the Xbox 360, iirc. It was like 2 or 3 years ago and the difference was noticeable. Time ago it was meant to work on very slow connections too, but as average connection speed worldwide increased they decided to improve the audio quality for chat. It was a smart decision, but Xbox One takes it to a whole new level.
 
Microsoft's PR team should really shoot themselves.

They REALLY should clarify the following:

1. Is language/localization bound to the country you select?

2. Do all launch consoles support every language/localization supported regardless of region/country sold? (Contain identical software)

3. Is voice control bound to the country you select or the language/localization you select?


So far these three really important issues is very muddy.
In my opinion, #1 should be NO, #2 should be YES, and #3 should be NO.
Choice for language/localization/input support should always be given to the consumer, and allowed to be changed anywhere, anytime, with all available options instead of restricting certain languages to certain countries.

Why should any console maker make the decision that all players in Germany use German instead of English, Japanese, or any other language they they like?


EDIT:
It seems like #2 is a no (facepalm)

At launch you'll be able to choose from the following language options: English (UK and US), French, Spanish (Mexico and Spain), Italian, German and Portuguese.
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So you can choose language options

"the marketing team is working on a chart that gives clarity on what locales, languages, and voice features are available in each country. Trying to write it down would be confusing. Stay tuned for a more detailed explanation."
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But apparently you can't choose your country, since your language options is available/unavailable depending on country

This is ridiculous. I can't believe they're going to hand out different software based on country in 2013. I totally thought regioning your software was a thing of the past and you just stuffed all languages into the package and get it done there.

I guess that is expected, given how Apple does all languages for OSX and Windows still restricts you to certain languages. (At least in Win 7, not sure about Win 8)
Idiotic, but unsurprised.
 
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SlimJim said:
1) no Dutch language in 2014, even though Xbox1 will launch in that year
2) low number of consoles sold, even when taking into account the severely reduced consumer anticipation of the next xbox system
3) no tv-cable deals in the Netherlands at launch.
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Re 1: won't ever happen.. ever tried to use Siri in Holland ? It just won't get our english accent. Only when I try to speak like some farmer (no offense here) from Texas with a "twang" it seems to recognize my voice. So in other words, for languages outside english, spanish, french, german, chinese (?) voice commands will be useless.

Re 3: outside the US the TV feature is useless. I don't think they will able to deals in the heavily fragmented European media landscape. Maybe in the UK with Sky. In Holland the trend is to get away from cable boxes as far as I am concerned. The trend seems to go into the direction of Smart TVs and CI+ (= smart card in the TV, TV does the decoding etc). I just don't see the added value of TV in the XO here.
 
Don't know if this was posted but what Albert said a couple days ago Re: launch,,,

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=78575701&postcount=181

Wow. My grip on truthfulness was that tenuous?

Perhaps, it could be taken at face value that we are telling the truth. I haven’t been up here posting spin or BS. I’ve been pushing hard to be transparent in how we talk about what’s going on with the platform. And I’m clear when I can’t comment on things.

Yet, somehow since this truth doesn’t jibe with the popular belief online, we are being dishonest. I get that we’ve had a rough few months, but at some point I’d like to think we get the benefit of the doubt, at least on things that make sense logically. You know, Occam’s Razor and such.
Here’s truth:

There never has been any sort of yield or performance issues with our GPU/ESRAM/KINECT/ETC. It’s simply not true, and I’ve heard the rumors online so often I actually went to the silicon engineers to ask them again. Our HW program (knock-on-wood) has been on schedule and again, we’ve had the opportunity to increase performance even later in the program. You don’t have yield issues then upgrade the clock speed by 6%. Again, simple logic here.

Second, if we were having yield issues – why did our country delay not include markets like the US, Canada, or UK? Those represent the vast majority of our volumes. Anyone can look at GFK Chart-Track and see the volumes in the regions that slipped. Here’s an assignment for the GAF Detectives: go look at historical sell-thru rates of consoles by region, then tell me what percentage of global consoles sales were represented by those affected markets. (hint: it’s a small percentage). Each and every region is important to us, don’t get me wrong, but anyone can look at those numbers and deduce it has nothing to do with volume.

I’m going to state it again, just like I said here and to OXM: The delay was localization related. Besides needing local language support, we also need to prop-up local Live, Apps, a Marketplace, and a variety of other services. We bundle that together as “localization” in messaging, but there is more to shipping in a region then text and voice translation. The offset to that, like we’ve said, X1 is region free and while that’s slightly more inconvenient, it will still allow people in the local countries to enjoy launch. Again, not something we’d be promoting if we were having issues with volume.


I’m certainly not going to change everyone’s mind, I get that. And I know there is tendency to believe there are many more diabolical things going on behind the scenes. In this case, we are being fully transparent. And FYI – we passed FCC certification back in early summer, before PS4.

Lastly – anything that was shown on a box, was shown on near-final retail HW. Our Dev Kits and Retail Units are the same.

Albert “spoonful of sugar” Penello
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loekf said:
Re 1: won't ever happen.. ever tried to use Siri in Holland ? It just won't get our english accent. Only when I try to speak like some farmer (no offense here) from Texas with a "twang" it seems to recognize my voice. So in other words, for languages outside english, spanish, french, german, chinese (?) voice commands will be useless.

Re 3: outside the US the TV feature is useless. I don't think they will able to deals in the heavily fragmented European media landscape. Maybe in the UK with Sky. In Holland the trend is to get away from cable boxes as far as I am concerned. The trend seems to go into the direction of Smart TVs and CI+ (= smart card in the TV, TV does the decoding etc). I just don't see the added value of TV in the XO here.
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I'm not sure about rest of the Europe, but cable/digitv-boxes have been pretty much useless in Finland for years - if you want to get extra channels that cost and thus require CI(+)-card, your TV will most likely have it - most people don't get them and for them it doesn't matter if the TV doesn't have the reader.
Built-in DVB-C, -C2 (or whatever the HD version was?), -T, -T2, -S and -S2 are all easily available, most new TV's support C2+T2 and have sister model with added S2.

Then again - I'm using a box myself, since I'm using IPTV-service for extra channels, (online) DVR function etc.
 
BRiT said:
I really wish there was some solid information available for both console's security systems. So far there has been absolutely none. This is the aspect that is most interesting to me, but alas nothing solid at all.
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There is a ton of information on TrustZone but you'll find zero on any specific implementation of it for any product. This is kind of the point. You don't deploy a TrustZone solution then tell everybody how it works :rolleyes:
 
DSoup said:
There is a ton of information on TrustZone but you'll find zero on any specific implementation of it for any product. This is kind of the point. You don't deploy a TrustZone solution then tell everybody how it works :rolleyes:
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Yeah, I know all of that, but that's security through obscurity. That kind of protection will be extremely short lived as the retail units will be reverse engineered so the hacking community will have some idea on how it works. Of course the nuances and really solid details on it will take longer to sort out.

If you have a really solid security mechanism telling people how it works won't weaken it.
 
BRiT said:
Yeah, I know all of that, but that's security through obscurity. That kind of protection will be extremely short lived as the retail units will be reverse engineered so the hacking community will have some idea on how it works. Of course the nuances and really solid details on it will take longer to sort out.
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Well TrustZone isn't obscure ;) it's use is pretty widespread. As for reverse engineering, well that's the beauty of TrustZone. To reverse engineer it you have to have broken it already. I would envisage both Sony and Microsoft will use a similar security model to the PS3, except with TrustZone securing the hypervisor. With TrustZone only being visible and accessible from code with hypervisor privileges, it's as secure as you can get.

To compromise the hypervisor you have to compromise TrustZone. To compromise TrustZone you have to compromise the hypervisor. It's your basic chicken and egg security model.

Had PS3 had such a TrustZone security implementation, it wouldn't have been broken using the approach taken by geohot.

BRiT said:
If you have a really solid security mechanism telling people how it works won't weaken it.
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Well they've stated it's TrustZone. Once you read up on TrustZone you can work out the rest :)
 
Cyan said:
A couple of rumours -thanks javisoft for the news-. Red Dead Rebellion could be a Xbox One exclusive.

The Xbox One version of Watch Dogs could be the best console version of the game 'cos it is the only console version of the game running at 1080p and 60 fps.

http://www.xboxlive.fr/news_affiche_22430.html
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Rockstar making a console exclusive? Not a chance in hell.

I'll lump the other rumour in with the likelihood of the first.
 
Cyan said:
A couple of rumours -thanks javisoft for the news-. Red Dead Rebellion could be a Xbox One exclusive.

The Xbox One version of Watch Dogs could be the best console version of the game 'cos it is the only console version of the game running at 1080p and 60 fps.

http://www.xboxlive.fr/news_affiche_22430.html
Click to expand...
Someone in the comments said it's a false rumor and that it originated from misterxmedia, but I'm not going to click to validate. It already smells from afar.
 
Anyone see the reports that the Mountain Dew promotional material for the xbox one at PAX states a late November release for the console.
 
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