Wednesday, November 23, 2005
The Xbox 360 in Videos
Posted by Jason Dunn in "HARDWARE" @ 05:40 PM
Yesterday I took a series of video clips with my Casio S500 digital camera showing various aspects of the Xbox 360, mostly focused on it's capabilities as a digital media playback device and a Media Center Extender for my MCE 2005 PC. The videos are all 640 x 480, and 30fps, so they're on the large side and will take a bit to download. The should play in Windows Media Player 10 on the PC without any extra codecs. They're also a bit rough around the edges since I didn't have a tripod and didn't edit them, but I think you'll find them interesting because they show the Xbox 360 in a very real-world environment. Please note that this is a Core system running over composite cables, so it's not in high-definition (boo! hiss!).
Initial Setup: This is what I saw when I first powered the Xbox on. The setup consisted of selecting a language, a storage device (in my case, none), and that's it. It was very fast and painless to get started. [View Video - 14.6 MB]
Audio File Access: I was impressed at how quickly the Xbox 360 accessed my music (after I did the Windows Media Connect setup), but when I started to scroll down I saw why: it seemed to be downloading only parts of the list, and when you got to the end it would download the next chunk. I don't know if this is because I don't have a hard drive in the unit, but the end result is a faster experience. What I don't like, however, is that you can't scroll up to jump to the end of the list. I was trying to play an artist in the "W" section and it took quite a while to scroll down. They even could have implemented a left/right function to jump to a specific letter. [View Video - 6.2 MB]
Visualization Rotation: Visualizations on the Xbox 360 are simply mind-boggling. Even on a high end PC with a great graphics card, I've never seen music visualizations that are so buttery-smooth. In this video I demonstrate that by using the right thumb-stick you can rotate the angle of the visualization for extra cool-factor. [View Video - 24.9 MB]
Initial Setup: This is what I saw when I first powered the Xbox on. The setup consisted of selecting a language, a storage device (in my case, none), and that's it. It was very fast and painless to get started. [View Video - 14.6 MB]
Audio File Access: I was impressed at how quickly the Xbox 360 accessed my music (after I did the Windows Media Connect setup), but when I started to scroll down I saw why: it seemed to be downloading only parts of the list, and when you got to the end it would download the next chunk. I don't know if this is because I don't have a hard drive in the unit, but the end result is a faster experience. What I don't like, however, is that you can't scroll up to jump to the end of the list. I was trying to play an artist in the "W" section and it took quite a while to scroll down. They even could have implemented a left/right function to jump to a specific letter. [View Video - 6.2 MB]
Visualization Rotation: Visualizations on the Xbox 360 are simply mind-boggling. Even on a high end PC with a great graphics card, I've never seen music visualizations that are so buttery-smooth. In this video I demonstrate that by using the right thumb-stick you can rotate the angle of the visualization for extra cool-factor. [View Video - 24.9 MB]
