Wednesday, November 08, 2006

the 360 is slowly taking over my lounge

Just over a week ago, Microsoft announced the 'fall update' to their xbox 36o dashboard. This brought over 70 new features to the dashboard. One of them being the ability to stream & play WMV video from a networked PC to your 360! This opens up a whole world of possibilties!

On top of that, Microsoft recently announced that they will be launching a marketplace for TV & Films. This suggests that you can download movies & TV episodes to your HDD, and then watch them when you want!

This is a great idea (imo), however, this creates a bit of a problem. All those people who have got 360's & the 20gb hdd will need to buy a new hard drive if they want to download more than a couple of films!

And then what happens when your hard drive fills up with movie content that you want to keep? Surely Microsoft wont allow you to transfer films from your 360 to your PC, because that would just be offering pirates a way to share films!

So what will happen? You pay £8 for a film, it takes up 2gb (HD films will likely take up ALOT more space)?. You can fit 6(ish) on a 20gb hard drive. So what happens when you want to download more than 6? I wouldn't want to delete films after i've payed for them!

So, the obvious answer would be get a bigger hdd, which Microsoft haven't announced, but there are plenty of rumours regarding 100gb drives. What happens when that fills up though? Where will it end?

To me, the perfect answer would be to download files via your PC and save them on your computer. And then either stream them over your network to your 360, OR burn them to disc, and put the disc in the 360. This will allow you to create a catalogue without using hard drive space.

However, Microsoft have only just announced the Video Marketplace, and as far as im concerned, there aren't many details about just yet! Let's see how it pans out!

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