The front here at the back...
Right then… NOW we come to the front. Well, what can we say that hasn’t been said by every other site on the web? We could bang on about the famous ‘Ring of Light’ which is supposed to have all this functionality but to be honest, in practise, it’s not worth the bother. The ring is fine up close but any more than five or six feet away and you can’t really make out which quadrant is doing what. Of course, round the front we’ve got the little door with the two USB ports and the drawer for the DVD drive. This has a little plastic molding to hold DVDs or CDs vertically without having to hold them with your finger as the drawer closes and jamming yourfinger in the drive.
Popping a CD or DVD into the tray and then closing it will take you straight to the play options for either DVD or CD which is them controlled by either the Xbox 360 Media Remote or the joypad controller. During CD playback you get a load of visualisations in a similar way to Windows Media Player, except you can muck about with these a bit… which passes the time through the bad songs on each album. DVD playback jumps straight into the movie when the drawer is closed and again the remote or the keypad can be used for playback control.
Click for larger imageSo now we come to the two USB sockets. Now we covered streaming media over the network and what software you’d need earlier, but plugging in a USB device is a different kettle of fish. With the exception of files covered by DRM, rthe Xbox 360 will play music from most popular portable music players, including iPod and iPod Shuffle (you need a USB extension cable for the Shuffle though), Rios and pretty much all of Creative Labs MP3 players.
Click for larger imageBut it doesn’t just stop with MP3 players. If your digital camera has a USB port and you’ve got the cable, the Xbox 360 can stream the images straight off that too. It’s well worth checking out the Xbox website to find the full list of supported cameras but suffice to say that my Kodak Easyshare worked fine and Microsoft seem to have covered most of the major camera manufacturers.
Click for larger imageNow one big thing about the Xbox 360 is that you cannot load any content onto that 20 GB hard drive across your network. This is strictly streaming only folks! So if you want to store a load of music on your Xbox 360 to take away with you for a bit of gaming and tunes somewhere else your only options are to either go back through your music collection and re-rip your CDs, burn CDs from your PC and then rip then onto the Xbox 360 or buy a new load of stuff over Xbox LIVE Marketplace. Bummer, eh?
But hold on a second… What about those USB ports? Can they help? Yes, they can. You see, when you slap a music device such as a PSP or iPod into the Xbox 360s USB socket, it starts up a ‘Portable Device’ applet which then shows off all the accessible files. So all you need to do is get yourself a USB external hard drive, load it up from Windows and then slot that into the Xbox 360’s USB port and you’re away. Provided you’re using a USB 2.0 device the Xbox 360 will see it as a ‘Portable Device’ and let you access all you music and pictures with ease.
So there you have it, our quick guide to the ‘ins and outs’ of the Microsoft Xbox 360, written without the effect of the hype and hopefully being something you guys find useful. We all know what the front of an Xbox 360 looks like, but those of us who REALLY know, know that round the back is where the best action always is…
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