Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

I'm a big fan of the Xbox 360, but it sure is frustrating trying to use it to access all of my video content - I'm fighting my way through the transition from capturing and editing standard-definition video to high-definition video, and it's a bit of a struggle. I think very highly of H.264 as a compression format and have been using it to archive my content over the past year. Today I decided to put some effort into figuring out why my H.264 videos aren't showing up in my Xbox 360 when I browse for videos. At first I thought it was a matter of the H.264 videos I was creating not being in the right format - when you start digging into the guts of H.264 settings, you find a dizzying array of options, mostly around profiles. I found an Xbox team blog entry that said that H.264 support was limited to profile 4.1, and I'd encoded my H.264 test video as profile 4.2. But as I kept reading, I found the ugly truth: because my videos are stored on my Windows Home Server, the Xbox 360 will not play them back. What? Yeah, exactly. Read more...

"Microsoft's New Xbox Experience has been pored over and dated, but now that Major Nelson has revealed it requires "at least" 128MB storage available to work, where does that leave suckers Core and Arcade SKU Xbox 360 owners? Enter the Xbox 360 Memory Upgrade Program, doling out free 512MB MU's or $20 20GB HDDs to Core owners, and a $30 20GB HDD + 3 months of Xbox Live package to Arcade owners looking to upgrade. November 19, Xbox Live becomes a storage-only affair (that goes for Netflix streams too, requiring 8MB of free space), so grab your serial number and console ID from the current Xbox 360 Dashboard and hit the registration website."

Regretting your decision to go sans storage with the low end 360? With the fall update all but requiring storage for Xbox Live, Microsoft had a bit of a conundrum if they wanted to pull subscription $ from those with Core and Arcade versions. Even if you are not interested in Live, I'd say you can't go wrong picking up the 20 GB add on for your Arcade or Core.

"You knew it was coming, but Microsoft has made it official: the Xbox 360 is officially going to drop to as low as $199 starting Friday, September 5 in the U.S. The three currently offered SKUs will get a price drop in North America, following multiple retail leaks and a similar pricing adjustment for the Japanese market. The new MSRP for the current line up is as follows. Xbox 360 Arcade - $199 Xbox 360 - $299 Xbox 360 Elite - $399"

While not a surprise, I think this a pretty good move by Microsoft going into the end of the year. The $199 price point is psycologically important in that it is cheaper than the Wii, which STILL might be in short supply this holiday season.