Music and Video
Music and Video
As we’ve reported before, the Xbox 360 will be DVD usable straight out of the box, without the need to buy anything extra such as a remote. But there’s loads more info from Microsoft about just what the Xbox 360 can do.
The coolest feature for me, being a bit of a retro fan, is the Jeff Minter designed music visualisation tools which will allow you to customise what you see on the screen as your tunes are playing. This will accept input from the joypads and, when it become available, the camera, allowing you to totally personalise and customise your viewing while playing music. Knowing Jeff and his trippy hippy leanings, it’s going to be some far out stuff…man.
Back to the serious stuff and MS have made a huge nod towards other platforms with both iPods and PSPs being connectable and detected without the need for any extra software. You’ll then be able stream content direct from the device’s memory so playing your favourite tunes on your mate’s Xbox 360 from your iPod is a reality, as is boring him senseless with photos from your PSP. Another very cool feature is that you’ll be able to make him doubly suffer as you can stream music from the iPod at the same time as viewing photos from your PSP (if you have both connected at once), so make the smug git suffer if he gets an Xbox 360 before you.
DVD playback will be progressive scan and the Xbox 360 will up-sample with DVds that don’t support progressive scanning.
Burning music from your albums to the HDD will now store album info on the drive too. Using a system similar to CDDB, going online will get you more info, such as cover art etc when the album is on your HDD. Anyone who uses Windows Media Player will be familiar with this set-up.
Of course, some people will have plenty of content already on their PC and you’ll be able to stream from your PC to the Xbox 360. You won’t be able to stream DVDs from your PC’s DVD drive however… but to be honest, with a DVD drive in the Xbox 360, why would you want to? Xbox 360 uses Windows Media Extender, so integration and connectivity between your PC and the Xbox 360 should be as seamless and painless as possible.
