**Official New Xbox Experience Thread** - Poll Added

[ric0chet06]

anyone figure out how to completely disable the stupid avatars?

 

[herkulease]

Has anyone found any free themes? I find it kinda crappy that the 360 theme doesn't even let you change colors. at least with the old dash you had like some small selection. So far that has been my gripe.

 

[herkulease]

Originally posted by: BD2003

Originally posted by: TallBill

Originally posted by: mesthead21
Man, i love the new dash. Such a vast improvement over the blades

Vomit, I still can't figure out how to change my theme. The blades are now 90% advertising.

Yeah, the ads are a bit ridiculous. It'd be nice to start at just "my xbox", but in reality, its only two button presses away, so no big deal. But yeah, 90% ads is about right.

well one click, if you hide the welcome channel which really just useless info.

 

[blurredvision]

Originally posted by: UpgradeFailure

Originally posted by: blurredvision

Originally posted by: Zim Hosein
Yeah I may be going blind, but where do I enter the 2 codes that came w/ my LE: GOW2 under the NEX?

Don't worry, I couldn't find how to change my theme for the life of me .

Thank God it wasn't just me.

Haha. I finally found the theme changer last night. If I remember correctly, it's under My Xbox, then go to the slot with your avatar guy standing there, and enter into that. Then the theme change is an option.

 

[blurredvision]

Now that the online marketplace is working halfway decently (and fast), I'm really liking it. I've queued up a couple of Arcade demos to test it out, and everything seems good so far.

 

[erwos]

I played with it some yesterday, and here are my thoughts:
1. Avatars are nice, and don't really seem very intrusive. I prefer them over Miis, anyways. Kingdom of Keflings makes good use of them in-game, but I was somewhat appalled by the performance of that game...
2. Having the option of selecting a default category on start-up would be handy.
3. I'm finding it takes more time to get to certain things - the game library in particular.
4. Maybe it's just dumb advertising, but I actually like the new channels and think more casual users will find them quite useful. Not all of us read Joystiq and Kotaku every five minutes, I guess.
5. I'm very glad you can disable the welcome category.
6. Game installs are very nicely integrated, and I love how games now have their information laid-out.
7. Community games are extremely underwhelming, especially given the amounts being charged for them.
8. What happened to the change log we saw with every major dashboard release?
9. Disappointed that we still don't have AAC-5.1 support.

 

[blurredvision]

Originally posted by: erwos
3. I'm finding it takes more time to get to certain things - the game library in particular.

Same here.

I must say that Microsoft's plans for world domination with the NXE are getting closer to fruition, because after my wife saw my avatar last night, she immediately wanted to create one. I rarely get her to touch Rock Band, let alone any other game. But she spent a solid 20 minutes on her avatar last night.

 

[amdhunter]

I don't know how I like the system yet...

Has anyone noticed delays when viewing other peoples Avatars? My 360 locked up completely when I viewed one particular friends Avatar, and took roughly a minute to recover. I almost expected a RROD to pop out.

Also, I wish they would implement a way to hide every set of blades, not just the Welcome one. I cannot stand the way Microsoft is stuffing adverts everywhere on it.

Also, before I go and move my wall unit, has anyone found out whether it supports 1920x1200 resolutions over VGA yet?

I like the NXE better than the blade system, but if the current NXE will stay how it is now, I really hope to switch back to the blade system.

EDIT: I think I am going to default my 360 to boot to DVD rather than the dash. The adverts are waaay too much IMO.

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: amdhunter
Has anyone noticed delays when viewing other peoples Avatars? My 360 locked up completely when I viewed one particular friends Avatar, and took roughly a minute to recover. I almost expected a RROD to pop out.

Nope. I looked down my friends list, and it was just a nice, smooth line of avatars. I was a little shocked at how fast everyone had grabbed the update.

Also, I wish they would implement a way to hide every set of blades, not just the Welcome one. I cannot stand the way Microsoft is stuffing adverts everywhere on it.

To be fair, most of it is at least relevant advertising about events and features - sans the Nike commercial, which was a little funny and a lot creepy.

Also, before I go and move my wall unit, has anyone found out whether it supports 1920x1200 resolutions over VGA yet?

I'm pretty sure that everything I've read on the interwebs would indicate that this is not the case. OTOH, 1680x1050 will fill your screen if you've got a decent scaler... so I guess there's that?

I like the NXE better than the blade system, but if the current NXE will stay how it is now, I really hope to switch back to the blade system.

You're never going back - the blades as the main interface are gone. But Microsoft has always improved their interfaces, and part of this update was supposed to make that easier and faster for them - so our complaints might get addressed sooner rather than later.

I think that _some_ speed might be had from using the guide button - I haven't played much with it, but it brings up a rather abbreviated, bare-bones version of the blade interface. In fact, there's some stuff you can _only_ do from it (like deleting 0 point games).

 

[blurredvision]

Originally posted by: erwos
I think that _some_ speed might be had from using the guide button - I haven't played much with it, but it brings up a rather abbreviated, bare-bones version of the blade interface. In fact, there's some stuff you can _only_ do from it (like deleting 0 point games).

The only thing I don't like about the guide interface is that Major Nelson pimped out the idea that you could do everything from the guide if you wanted. However, a lot of those options simply take you back to the new dashboard to change settings, which means you can't do them in-game (which was another "selling" point of the NXE).

 

[UpgradeFailure]

Originally posted by: blurredvision

Originally posted by: UpgradeFailure

Originally posted by: blurredvision

Originally posted by: Zim Hosein
Yeah I may be going blind, but where do I enter the 2 codes that came w/ my LE: GOW2 under the NEX?

Don't worry, I couldn't find how to change my theme for the life of me .

Thank God it wasn't just me.

Haha. I finally found the theme changer last night. If I remember correctly, it's under My Xbox, then go to the slot with your avatar guy standing there, and enter into that. Then the theme change is an option.

Thanks. That's of course a place I didn't even think of looking. I must have looked under the normal system menu 90 times just thinking I was missing it somehow

 

[tatteredpotato]

Originally posted by: amdhunter
I don't know how I like the system yet...

Has anyone noticed delays when viewing other peoples Avatars? My 360 locked up completely when I viewed one particular friends Avatar, and took roughly a minute to recover. I almost expected a RROD to pop out.

Also, I wish they would implement a way to hide every set of blades, not just the Welcome one. I cannot stand the way Microsoft is stuffing adverts everywhere on it.

Also, before I go and move my wall unit, has anyone found out whether it supports 1920x1200 resolutions over VGA yet?

I like the NXE better than the blade system, but if the current NXE will stay how it is now, I really hope to switch back to the blade system.

EDIT: I think I am going to default my 360 to boot to DVD rather than the dash. The adverts are waaay too much IMO.

I wish you could change the default channel when you sign on. Right now I believe it's spotlight or something, I'd much rather have it be "My Xbox"

 

[Queasy]

Netflix post on what they are using to encode video for streaming. Long-ish so click through if you're interested.

 

[R Nilla]

I was able to stream an episode of The Office last night in HD, it was glorious.

Only an hour or two later I couldn't even carry a private chat conversation with a friend, and when I tried to play Gears 2 with him, my character was jumping all over the place. I went back to Netflix and could barely get the lowest quality stream possible. Later, it said my connection was too slow to stream anything.

Anyone else have issues last night? This all started around 8:30 PM EST.

 

[JoPh]

Originally posted by: R Nilla
I was able to stream an episode of The Office last night in HD, it was glorious.

Only an hour or two later I couldn't even carry a private chat conversation with a friend, and when I tried to play Gears 2 with him, my character was jumping all over the place. I went back to Netflix and could barely get the lowest quality stream possible. Later, it said my connection was too slow to stream anything.

Anyone else have issues last night? This all started around 8:30 PM EST.

i had streaming issues too. while my laptop was streaming perfect.

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: R Nilla
Anyone else have issues last night? This all started around 8:30 PM EST.

Nope. I logged on at 9PM or so, and things were a lot smoother than they were at 6AM. Probably just your ISP having issues?

 

[R Nilla]

Originally posted by: JoPh

Originally posted by: R Nilla
I was able to stream an episode of The Office last night in HD, it was glorious.

Only an hour or two later I couldn't even carry a private chat conversation with a friend, and when I tried to play Gears 2 with him, my character was jumping all over the place. I went back to Netflix and could barely get the lowest quality stream possible. Later, it said my connection was too slow to stream anything.

Anyone else have issues last night? This all started around 8:30 PM EST.

i had streaming issues too. while my laptop was streaming perfect.

Yeah, I'm hoping it was just an issue with Live due to the rollout of NXE, but my router likes to be flaky every now and then so it's hard to say.

 

[Gooberlx2]

Originally posted by: Queasy
Netflix post on what they are using to encode video for streaming. Long-ish so click through if you're interested.

Interesting stuff.

I had been ripping and encoding my own DVDs using cropped, anamorphic VC1AP @ 1500kbps avg, 2500kbps peak (I think), 24fps w/ 5.1 WMApro to stream to the 360.

I wouldn't have thought that 2600kbps would have been quite enough for a good HD stream, but they're probably doing a lot more tweaking of the codec than I was. Maybe those were just the average values; I wonder what the peak values are. In any case 3800kbps would definitely be a better encode than mine.

Watching some of the Storms Over Everest last night (until my bandwidth hiccupped and reduce the stream quality), I didn't noticed any motion artifact at all and I think it looked great. I sorta expected it to be sharper, but those open air documentaries are a little less reliable with the subject focus anyway. I'll have to watch some episodes of The Office to see if they're any different.

I'll still get a blu-ray player some day...when they're affordable. Probably that LG BD300.

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: Queasy
Netflix post on what they are using to encode video for streaming. Long-ish so click through if you're interested.

If my math is right, @3800kbps a 2 hour movie in HD would only be about 3.4 GB - is that right? That's pretty good. I didn't have any complaints about the video quality when I was watching The Office in HD.

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: mugs

Originally posted by: Queasy
Netflix post on what they are using to encode video for streaming. Long-ish so click through if you're interested.

If my math is right, @3800kbps a 2 hour movie in HD would only be about 3.4 GB - is that right? That's pretty good. I didn't have any complaints about the video quality when I was watching The Office in HD.

Not really. If you want to have a de facto lossless conversion of an MPEG-2 480p movie from a DVD into, say, H.264, you're looking at 1500-2000kbps. Once you jack up the resolution to 720p, just doubling the bitrate (note: the resolution has more than doubled) isn't exactly going to get you great-looking HD. And that goes doubly so for VC-1, which is not _quite_ as efficient as H.264 (albeit it's not too far off).

 

[foghorn67]

I like it so far.
The one thing I did notice is that every single CoD4 match I got last night was a crap lag fest.

 

[amdhunter]

Originally posted by: ObscureCaucasian

Originally posted by: amdhunter
I don't know how I like the system yet...

Has anyone noticed delays when viewing other peoples Avatars? My 360 locked up completely when I viewed one particular friends Avatar, and took roughly a minute to recover. I almost expected a RROD to pop out.

Also, I wish they would implement a way to hide every set of blades, not just the Welcome one. I cannot stand the way Microsoft is stuffing adverts everywhere on it.

Also, before I go and move my wall unit, has anyone found out whether it supports 1920x1200 resolutions over VGA yet?

I like the NXE better than the blade system, but if the current NXE will stay how it is now, I really hope to switch back to the blade system.

EDIT: I think I am going to default my 360 to boot to DVD rather than the dash. The adverts are waaay too much IMO.

I wish you could change the default channel when you sign on. Right now I believe it's spotlight or something, I'd much rather have it be "My Xbox"

You know, that would make me very happy.

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: erwos

Originally posted by: mugs

Originally posted by: Queasy
Netflix post on what they are using to encode video for streaming. Long-ish so click through if you're interested.

If my math is right, @3800kbps a 2 hour movie in HD would only be about 3.4 GB - is that right? That's pretty good. I didn't have any complaints about the video quality when I was watching The Office in HD.

Not really. If you want to have a de facto lossless conversion of an MPEG-2 480p movie from a DVD into, say, H.264, you're looking at 1500-2000kbps. Once you jack up the resolution to 720p, just doubling the bitrate (note: the resolution has more than doubled) isn't exactly going to get you great-looking HD. And that goes doubly so for VC-1, which is not _quite_ as efficient as H.264 (albeit it's not too far off).

Well...
1. I've seen the HD content on the 360+Netflix, and it looks fine to me
2. That is the max stated bitrate in their blog post

So... what are you saying "not really" to?

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: mugs

Originally posted by: erwos

Originally posted by: mugs
If my math is right, @3800kbps a 2 hour movie in HD would only be about 3.4 GB - is that right? That's pretty good. I didn't have any complaints about the video quality when I was watching The Office in HD.

Not really. If you want to have a de facto lossless conversion of an MPEG-2 480p movie from a DVD into, say, H.264, you're looking at 1500-2000kbps. Once you jack up the resolution to 720p, just doubling the bitrate (note: the resolution has more than doubled) isn't exactly going to get you great-looking HD. And that goes doubly so for VC-1, which is not _quite_ as efficient as H.264 (albeit it's not too far off).

Well...
1. I've seen the HD content on the 360+Netflix, and it looks fine to me
2. That is the max stated bitrate in their blog post

So... what are you saying "not really" to?

The "that's pretty good" portion of your comment. It's a low bitrate for 720p material, IMHO.

 

[Sheep]

Originally posted by: erwos
I think that _some_ speed might be had from using the guide button - I haven't played much with it, but it brings up a rather abbreviated, bare-bones version of the blade interface. In fact, there's some stuff you can _only_ do from it (like deleting 0 point games).

Thanks for posting this. Deleting 0 point games was the ONLY thing I haven't figured out how to do yet.

I find myself using the barebones version of the friends list a lot more than the graphical one. I don't know who thought showing only one friend avatar on the screen was a good idea (even if you can see who's in their party). I only have 30-something friends and it's a chore to sort through; I can't imagine what it's like for people with more friends on their list.