Xbox Live “Metro” Dashboard

Being a Software Tester and a Gamer, I obviously jumped at the chance to become a beta tester for the new Xbox Dashboard. Earlier this week I got the “Time for an update” message, and knew it was time to play.

As always with the Xbox updates, it just worked, took very little time and before I knew it, I was presented with the new dash, and I have to say, Microsoft have really impressed me.

So, what to expect when this goes live to the public ?

First screen you get is, Download a profile, Create a profile, or log in using your profile on a memory stick or hard drive. I have multiple Xboxs in the house, so tend to carry my profile and saves on a memory stick. However what I did was hit the download profile button. Within about 30 seconds it downloaded my profile from the server and plonked this on the hard drive, you are then given the option to save password….this essentially automatically logs you in when you switch on the Xbox.

Once your logged in, your presented by the new dashboard. This seems a lot cleaner than the previous version as it groups the content together with a title bar above.

The landing screen (at least for me) is Home, which gives you a Play <Current game in your DVD Drive>, Quickplay (the previous couple of games you’ve played), a rolling advert in the middle, and a couple of adverts down the right hand side.

The left tab to this in the bing search, which I’ve tried on the the Kinect and this seems to work fine. I shouted at it “Xbox Bing Search Batman” and was presented by all the batman films, games, and any music that was available on Zune Music. I could then just say “Lego Batman”, then screens, and I could quite easily navigate through the screens with the power of my voice.

The tab to the right of Home is social. Now this is where I think the major difference is. No longer do you have a massive list of friends that you have to scroll through, you only get the friends that are online and what they are playing. You can if you wish click on the friends tab and see everyone.

Underneath your friends button you also have a Social Apps section, this is where you will find the likes of twitter, facebook and video kinect. Finally on the screen you have the option to Sign In or Out.

Now one of the major additions is you can now see friends of friends. Clicking on any of your friends will give you the option to Send Message, Join Game, Invite to Party, Compare Games or Friends. The Friends button will show you a list of your friends friends, what they are playing and essentially everything you would expect to see if these people where in your friends list.

Another feature under the Friends tab are Parties, Beacons & Activity and Add friend. Add friend and Parties explain themselves, however the Beacons & Activity is quite interesting. The centre tab is “My Activity” which give you your top 5 activities, currently at the top of mine is Skyrim, which says 2 online, and 13 recently played. Clicking on this drills you down another level and takes you to a “Your friends’ activity in this game”. Currently this lists 13 of my friends, which you can then click through to their profile.

The next tab is Friends’ Activity, which gives “The games and apps your friends have been playing” and essentially a personalised top 10, with the top seeming to be Modern Warfare 3, on the Xbox, with 19 recently played. This screen is quite interesting, if I wanted to play online with my xbox friends, I know what games are hot within my gaming community. Currently the top 5 are Modern Warefare 3, Gear of War 3, Battlefield 3, Skyrim and Call of Duty Elite.

The final tab in here is the My Beacons. Here you can tag a game, and highlight to your friends that you want to hook up and play online. From my understanding, if one of your friends starts playing a tagged game, they will be notified that you want to play. Beacons are also something you can set on the Xbox.com website, as this has just had a major overall to bring in line with the Metro dashboard.

What they have added, and I think is an excellent feature is a more verbose notification system. Previously if I fired up a game that others were playing, it would say “Friends playing this game”, now it tells you how many friends are playing this game. Also, if friends start playing a game you are playing, you will get a notification saying <friends names> has started playing <your game>, which I think will be brilliant for people wanting to hook up and play multiplayer games.

The next 3 screen Video, Games, Music all work similar to the current dashboard, but redesigned to the new format.

The next screen, Apps, intrigues me, and not sure where they’re going to go with it. Currently in the beta this had Sky, ZuneVideo, ZuneMusic, Last.fm, Facebook and Halo Waypoint (as I have these all installed. There is a My Apps “folder” that contains Media Center, Picture Viewer, View Player, Music Player and Sky. The next “folder” is the one that intrigues me.. “Apps Marketplace”. Currently all this has in it is “Social”, and takes you to the Social tab, however this could get interesting if they start to add more apps.

The next tab is Pre-release, which currently has Green Preview, Latest Info, New Features, Help and Tips, which essentially give you a text dump to the screen. The Green Preview however doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

The final screen is settings, and here you can find all the normal, System, Preferences, Profile, Kinect, Account, Privacy, Family and Turn Off.

Now one of the major features you’ll find here is the Cloud Saves. Microsoft are kindly giving 512Mb of cloud storage to gold members. This isn’t enabled by default, you need to go into System >> Storage >> Cloud Saved Games >> Enable. Once this is done, you can select this as a storage device as you would if you were saving to a memory stick. What is seems to do is use a local cache, and then upload to the cloud in the background, I assume this as I’ve recently been playing skyrim, and after turning off the xbox, the light blinks on the front as it does when you have background downloads enabled.

All in all I’m very impressed with this update, and only hope Sony copy what they’ve done with the cloud storage, instead of this ‘backup your saves at some point during the night rubbish’ that they have, this doesn’t help me having multiple consoles and wanting to move between room.

One thing I will say, is I hope they give the option to buy more storage, as Skyrim and my 48 saves take up most of the 512Mb, and there is no way I can get my 2Gb of Dragon Age saves up there.

Tags: activity, advert, adverts, Batman, batman films, beta tester, button, chance, content, drive, dvd drive, facebook, feature, gamer, hard drive, home, house, lego, little time, lt, memory stick, Metro, Microsoft, music, option, password, play, previous version, profile button, screen, software, software tester, tab, Video, xbox, xbox dashboard, xbox live, Xboxs

Playstation Plus

I’ve got a few good things to say about Sony’s Playstation plus, however a lot of bad things. Granted it’s still in it’s infant stages, but it’s so lacking at the moment, especially when you compare it with the Xbox Live service.

When firmware 3.60 was release, with the online storage option, I finally took the plunge and dropped £40 on a Playstation Plus subscription. I’m in a fortunate position where I have 2 PS3′s, (one in the front room, and one in the bedroom), and the idea of being able to save to the “cloud”, then pick up again in another room really appealed to me. I also like the idea of the automatic download feature, that basically downloading the updates to the games while the machine is switched off. This would fix one of the things I find most annoying about the PS3 over the Xbox, size of the updates, for some reason updating a game on the Xbox takes literally seconds, where the PS3 takes minutes….sometime even hours (Currently updating GT5 as we speak)

Now maybe I should have read up on this first, or at least spent some time in the forums reading peoples impressions first before dropping the £40, but was what I was hoping for.

• The ability to save directly to the cloud, and pickup on another PS3 (just like the Steam Cloud)
• The ability for the PS3 to download my updates while I slept (this way I never had to see again the “There is an update, do you want to download it” screen)

What I actually got….

The ability to manually backup my save games to the cloud (the same functionality we used to have with a USB stick……). Unfortunately non of my games recognise the cloud storage, so it means I have to manually download my save game, then remember to re-upload it once I’ve finished playing. This has already caught me out a number of times….I fired up a game of the other PS3, only to have to quit to the XMB to copy the save game local….or even fire up the other PS3 to copy the game to the cloud :s

On the subject of copying, Sony really don’t make it easy. Probably like most people, the first thing I did was to copy all my save games on to the cloud storage, this I had to do once save at a time !…..there is a “group saves by game” function, but you still have to go into the grouped folder and manually copy each one across….took me an evening to back everything up.

Next the storage size…..150Mb ?….in this day and age…..when each one of my later Fallout 3 saves were over 5Mb each….obviously I didn’t have room to fit them all on, come on Sony, if the likes of Dropbox can offer us 2GB for free, 150Mb is a joke.

So, once I’d back up all my saves, I thought…ok time for the automatic download setting. Once I’d finally found the setting, I selected my 2 hour windows of “when to download” and left it too it. I then went to the 2nd Ps3 to set up the automatic download on that, in the hope to select a different 2 hour windows, but was politely told that I already have automatic download setup on my account, and I do have it on this or the other 1, but not at the same time …….really ?

Now if my understanding is currect, the automatic download feature is useless if you use the cloud storage, as it uses your local save game files as it’s base of “what to download”, if there are no saves on the PS3 (which on mine there aren’t as they’re all in the cloud), then it doesn’t download anything !….*clap, clap, well done Sony*

Ok, so finally the content, and what you really get for your £40 a year. Now I agree, you do get benefit when you have a plus subscription, but are they worth it.

Below is the list of what I downloaded from the Playstation plus “benefits”

Sonic the Hedgehog (not HD’d up, just added trophies), looked and sounded horrible

Astro Tripper, Pix’n Love and Enigmo (all mini games, played once, and deleted)

inFamous 2 Dynamic theme (does look pretty cool, I have to say)

All apart from the theme have now been deleted, this was from the below list of possible downloads for the month of March

2 March to 5 April 2011
All titles are for PlayStation 3 unless stated otherwise.

Games
Sonic the Hedgehog – one month exclusive for PlayStation Plus members
Astro Tripper
Pix’n Love Rush (minis) – two weeks early for PlayStation Plus members
Enigmo (minis) – two weeks early for PlayStation Plus members

Full Game Trial
Prince of Persia

Special Offers
PlayTV Live Chat – 25% off until 6 July 2011
Fat Princess – 50% off
Fat Princess (PSP) – 50% off
StarDrone (PS3) – 50% discount on day of launch
Premier Manager – 50% off

Dynamic themes and Premium Avatars
EyePet Avatars
inFamous 2 theme
Sega Mega Drive Classics theme
MotorStorm Apocalypse Urban Avatar
MotorStorm Apocalypse Burning Avatar
MotorStorm Apocalypse Rookie XMB theme

Maybe I’m just disappointed as I was expecting more, I was hoping for Steam Cloud type storage, I was hoping to never see a “Update is available” screen again, but currently this isn’t the case.

Maybe now they have the Cloud storage backbone in place, developers will release updates to their games to allow saving directly to this. I do however think that if they get their butts into gear and get this working properly before the NGP (Sony’s Next Generation Portable aka PSP2) comes out, then saving a game on the PS3, then continuing on the NGP ticks all my boxes. I know that Microsoft attempted to do this Windows to Windows Mobile to Xbox….but it’s not really happened yet.

Personally if anybody is planning on dropping on the PS+ subscription, I don’t think it’s worth it yet, give it a couple of months and see if developers start to implement the “direct to cloud” saves.

Tags: Astro, bedroom, cloud, Download, Dynamic, feature, firmware, fortunate position, functionality, game, games, Impressions, infant, infant stages, machine, option, pickup, Pix, Playstation, plunge, Princess, PS3, reading, reason, screen, Size, sony, steam, steam cloud, storage option, time, xbox, xbox live, xmb

Finally digitised

Many many moons ago, I spent the best part of 3 months, ripping all my CD’s to mp3, ensuring all the meta tag info was correct, and the album artwork was present.

This year, it’s time for my DVD collection.

As some of you may know, I’ve recently bought an Apple TV (well 2 actually), and a 4TB Raid Storage device to store all my media.

After playing around with the Apple TV, I noticed the feature of “Computers”, and how this would stream anything from my iTunes library on my MacMini. As a test, I added a few more items (as I only had the “Digital Copies” from some of my recent DVD purchases), and these streamed fine, so decided to work on ripping my entire collection.

So, about a 2 months ago, I set to work using Handbrake to start ripping all my DVD’s to a “iTunes happy” format. Handbrake comes with a number of default settings, and I found using the default “Apple TV” format gave a good balance between quaility and file size. Another great feature of this default setting is that not only does it rip the 5.1 audio stream (allowing this to be played via the Apple TV), it also took the 5.1 track and down sampled this to 2 channels, allowing this to be played on any other device that can read mp4 format.

So two painful month have passed, and I’ve finally ripped all my DVD movies, meta tagged them, and added them to the iTunes library on the MacMini.

To get all 276 DVD Movies, and multiple TV boxsets ripped into iTunes I had 5 Macs all running Handbrake 0.94 and spent every spare moment at home switching disks as they finished. I had no problem with 95% of the disk, as they ripped first time. I did however find problems with some of the newer disks, and had to use either MacTheRipper to rip them to my hard drive, or if that didn’t work Ripit seemed to get it done. Once on my hard drive, I was able to then covert them.

As you can imagine, the disks were all finishing at different times, and initially found myself checking the progress every hour or so. If a disk had finished, I then started the next disk going. After the first 50 disks or so, I decided there had to be a smarter way. After a little research, I found I could redirect the growl messages (for when the encoding was complete), to my iPhone. The software I used on my iPhone was Boxcar, this combined with a plugin for growl would then send me a push notification upon completion.

I noticed after I’d ripped them all, the some of the media looks a little “jaggy” (namely the animation, and some older films), after reading the forums, people suggested turning on the Detelecine setting in the Picture setting, and this worked a treat. I did have to re-rip a handful of disks, but it was no biggy.

Once I’d ripped a film, I used a piece of software called iDentify, this searches TheMovieDB, tagChimp and TheTVDB and fill in all the meta information, including chapter names (if available), actors, rating, artwork etc.

I soon realised that if I named the film by it’s IMDB name, eg tt0092610, as in http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092610/, this would allow the software to instantly find the correct film. With the TV episodes, I learnt to look on TheTVDB.com first, and made sure the episodes I was ripping matched the naming on there, eg “Battlestar Galactica (2003)”, and then adding s01e01…and continued this throughout the boxsets. The result of this was the files renamed to either the IMDB name or TVDB name.

1 slight bugbear I had, was the TV boxsets that didn’t run in order. An example of this was the run order of Star Trek TNG, on one of the disks I believe it went 108, 116, 115, 117, or something like that. This meant I had to fire up the disk, and check the episode list before ripping, so I could name the files correctly, ensuring when the meta data was applied, it was correct for that episode.

All in all, a worthwhile task, I now have instant access to all my music, TV and movies from either the bedroom or front room.

Tags: album, album artwork, apple tv, artwork, audio stream, balance, Copies, default settings, digital copies, disk, drive, dvd purchases, entire collection, feature, going, Handbrake, IMDB, info, iphone, itunes, MacMini, macs, MacTheRipper, many moons, meta tag, multiple tv, plugin, progress, raid storage, Ripit, software, spare moment, storage device, tag, tag info, test, time, tv format, year