News & Rumors: Xbox One (codename Durango)

Then why the heck still an external power brick ? The XB1 casing feels a bit like a regular consumer electronics box... a big empty casing with lots of air...

 

kotaku review has some funny moments

 

Regarding voice control, it would be fine if there was a controller action to accomplish the same result, but that doesn't always seem to be the case from what I read. eg. to record gameplay with buttons you need to go to snap and end up recording yourself choosing record in the menus. Guess it's on the todo list.

 

I hope I come back as a bluejay in my next life and test how Kinect recognises me.

Another review, this time it is Anand style, so it's all about the technology:

http://anandtech.com/show/7528/the-xbox-one-mini-review-hardware-analysis

 

Probably to have a quieter machine which was deemed quite important last gen. From the DF link:

 

One thing I noticed that people have brought up is the fact when voice launching a game you have to say the complete name. I don't see what the problem is as how else would you launch a specific game instead of something similar? For example Ryse Son of Rome vs Rise of the Dead? It makes sense that you can't just say "rize" and expect the console to know which game you're talking about.

 

There are ways they could do it, but I don't know that it would help to have a choice pop up when you say 'play Forza' vs saying 'play Forza X'.

 

If you've got 2 or more games with similar name, then yes, you definitely need to give a more detailed command. But when you want to launch Forza and there's only 1 Forza in your library, then there is no reason why it wouldn't work with just Forza. Right now the voice command is too rigid. I was hoping for something a more natural.

 

I find this really baffling, as well. Phones have handled this exact problem with calling contacts from your address book for ages. If you call something out and there is only one substring match, then you use that, otherwise you prompt for a more specific request.

They're also really going to have to patch in a confirmation before switching games to avoid data loss. I can't imagine how that managed to make it to ship.


Between the Kotaku and Rev3 reviews, I think we have a pretty good sense of what corners had to be cut to make the ship date. I imagine a lot of these things will be ironed out over time, but it's unfortunate that things like surround passthrough for TV audio, storage management and data loss avoidance during app switching didn't make the bar for the launch.

Maybe the assumption is that early adopters are more likely to be forgiving of stuff like that and that things will improve down the line? I dunno.

 

Both those vowels sound the same short 'u' (under, umbrella, rust) in those words. 'Love' = luv and 'dumb' = dum.

 

Wow, that is shocking - for a supposedly all in one entertainment device not to support the most common surround format is pathetic.

Even if they don't want to pay royalties to Dolby and output DD, they should at least output multichannel PCM rather than downmixing to stereo.

 

Here's the part people aren't quoting from the review for whatever reason:

So decoding to alternate formats is coming but it's still in beta.

 

Yep, same info here http://kotaku.com/how-to-get-your-cable-tv-surround-sound-working-on-xbox-1468565797

 

Yes and it can result in false positives which can also be detrimental to the experience.

 

Why would audio decoding / encoding cause video distortion?...

 

From Albert Panelo just now...

 

Kotaku article mentiones a Time Warner cable box, I guess its USA user. Do they use some sort of DRM protection like DVB pay channels and/or CI+ conax paired HD channels? Thats what is waiting here in the europe.

This quote is indicating Xbox does mixing of own game audio and hdmi-in audio. Same for video pixels. I sense troubles for CI+/CA conax/VIAccess protected input.

Anyone tried already do hdmi-in signal passthroughs in standby or poweroff mode?

 

My guess is that cable boxes are so horrifically bad that some have bugs going back years that Microsoft will have to work around. I had a buddy that worked on the software in said cable boxes, and it's fascinating to hear how terrible the code for them really was. They had bugs in the bug database with estimated fix times of not weeks or months, but *years*. It's crazy how bad cable boxes really are. Would be interesting for someone to test the hdmi-in with something more modern like a DirecTV box, etc.

 

It wasn't _only_ a scheduling issue. I'm amazed they went through with it, I thought for sure they would cave in to dolby's demands.

 

That's pretty crappy, according to them:

Surround information is lost forever. That "beta surround" is just some form of stereo upmixing.