As you may well know, Microsoft used Halloween as the day to release the new November update for the Xbox 360 game console. The new update comes with a long list of new features and bug fixes. You can find information about what’s changed via this blog posting we made a few days ago.

Applying the update is a cinch – simply make sure your Xbox 360 is connected to the Internet; start up the 360 and watch it download the latest update. Once the update is downloaded, the 360 will apply the update and then restart the console.

I know some people out there who have purchased the Xbox 360 and have yet to connect the console to the Internet.. really folks – you should make use of the Net when it comes to the 360. Not only do you automatically get the latest updates from Microsoft, you can get downlodable content for the console and for the games – not to mention access to Xbox Live Arcade which I must admit, rocks.

Now I thought it would be cool to take some video captures of the new Dashboard under the Xbox 360 with my DV camcorder. Unfortunately my camcorder decided to take this opportunity to die on me. Soo, I had to resort to using my Canon G6 digital camera to take some low resolution grainy videos. Thus I apologize for the video captures but I hope you’ll get a feel for what the new update is all about.

The first video clip here is a general overview of the new Dashboard. At first glance not a lot has changed.. but that was like that after the Spring update too. One thing I did notice was how much speedier the profiles load on my console. If you have a lot of profiles loaded up on your Xbox 360, you’ll know how annoying the startup time can be as the console searches through all the profiles to find your one that will connect to the Live network. Things are way faster now.

Perhaps the most notable improvement is in the area of the Xbox Live Arcade and the Xbox Live Marketplace. The content is better organized on the marketplace and the games under the Live Arcade are listed so much faster now. Good job Microsoft.

 

The second video clip is of the games tab under the Dashboard. I thought I’d take a quick look through the tab and see what’s changed.

 

The third video clip is of the media section of the Dashboard. Here you’ll see the new availability of streaming videos from PCs. Unfortunately in my limited testing, you can only stream WMV formatted video clips at this point. What a waste.. I don’t know if you can stream anything else but I would think not since the decoding takes place on the Xbox 360 I would imagine and thus you’d need to have third party codecs installed in order to decode any other video formats other than WMV. Bummer.

 

The final video clip is of the systems tab and here the most notable change is the 1080p support which of course is for the HD DVD player which is soon coming out. I wish I had a 1080p display but hey – I’ll still buy that external player when it’s available!

That’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed these grainy messy videos.. I’ll try and get better video clips once my new camcorder arrives. Oh.. sorry for the background noise – that’s noise from construction crews and from the traffic on the 405. Ugh.

Enjoy!

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