Xbox Console Update’s Best Feature
Posted July 31st, 2009 @ 07:49am by Erik J. Barzeski
I've just gotten in on the new Xbox fall update, the preview. There are a lot of things I don't really care about - you can buy "props" for your avatars now, for example - but the update is well worth it for one area of improvement alone: Netflix.
The first run at the Netflix integration was great simply because it let you stream movies in addition to your three-at-a-time (or whatever you had) plan. Now, you can not only watch what's in your queue, but you can manage your queue, search for new movies to add, browse genre lists of movies, and more. Actual playback is improved because the video quality is now bumped UP when your network capacity increases. Better yet, there's no buffering in either direction: if your network capacity changes, the stream nearly instantly begins showing the higher- or lower-quality video.
Donate Life
Posted 06 Aug 2009 at 12:48pm #
I'm really surprised it took Microsoft this long to truly expand the xbox beyond just a game console. They've had integration with Media center PC's (which I use and love) since the beginning, but it is barely marketed at all. I only found out that I could stream movies, by reading some obscure tech blogs. Netflix puts them into the mainstream finally however.