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Xbox 360 Dashboard Update Brings More Video Formats

by Tim Stevens on December 4, 2007 at 10:06 AM

Xbox 360 Dashboard Update Brings IPTV, More Video Formats

A couple times a year, Microsoft sees fit to roll out a suite of improvements to the Xbox 360's Dashboard, the interface that you get if you boot up the thing without a game in the drive. From here you can browse the Marketplace, download games and movies, and not too long ago they added the ability to easily stream media from just about any computer. The company's latest Dashboard enhancement has dropped this morning, and it includes some helpful enhancements to make media lovers happier with their boxes.

The biggest enhancement is addition of support for DivX and XviD formatted videos. These are the two formats you're most likely to find in downloaded videos from the Internet, and until now playing them on the Xbox 360 required some complicated streaming and transcoding. Now you should be able to serve those videos up directly from your home PC or burn them to a DVD and play them right on the machine. Sweet.

Other helpful enhancements include the ability to set timers for individual accounts, meaning parents can restrict their kids to so many minutes of video games per day, and the ability to browse your friends' friends lists, giving a bit of a social networking twist to the Xbox Live service. All these nice improvements further cement Xbox Live's position as the best online service in gaming. Now if only we could do something about that $60-per-year fee...

[Correction: Turns out the update does not include IPTV, unfortunately.]

From Engadget

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Tags: breaking+news, DivX, IPTV, Streaming, top, Xbox 360, Xbox360, XviD

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