I have played with the updated Xbox 360 dashboard for a few weeks, and really am enjoying several of the new features. The new additions that I like are better support for using an Xbox Live account on multiple Xboxes and improved support for new video content sources.
Multi-Xbox support
We have two Xboxes in our house. The second Xbox is upstairs, and has been used mainly as a Windows Media Extender and as a way to watch Netflix and Hulu content. We haven’t used it to play games because it was too much of a pain to either recover our Gamertags or copy the profile and saved games to a USB thumb stick.
With the new Dashboard update, Microsoft added two features that help with users with multiple Xboxes.
Roaming Profile
Microsoft renamed “recovering” profiles to “downloading” profiles. With this you can “download” a profile on multiple consoles, with specifying the live.com password. This allows you to use the same Xbox Live account on multiple consoles (though not at the same time.) With this functionality, I am able to play a game on the upstairs Xbox while my wife or kids are watching something else on the downstairs TV.
One of our network switches stopped working. While looking for replacements, I decided to look for a switch that would be more energy-efficient than the existing one. I was very interested in D-Link’s Green line of products. I bought the DSG-1024D 24-port network switch. I figured that I would be able to replace several switches with a single energy-efficient switch.
The D-Link Green series has several ways that it saves power:
It powers down port where it detects an idle link status.
The switch can detect the cable length of Gigabit Ethernet run, and will use less power for shorter runs.
Before I replaced the switch, I measured the combined energy usages of the switches and did the same after replacing the old ones with the new switch. By just replacing the two older switches, with the single new switch I saw some power savings. Since I have other switches that are always on, I decided to replace those as well.
Once I replaced these switches, I saw a savings of 8 watts.
My wife and I traveled to Chicago this past weekend. There were two accessories that made the trip easier.
AmazonBasics Universal Travel Case
The AmazonBasics Travel Case allowed us to keep our assorted cables and accessories in a compact form. For this trip, we used it to store:
2 cell phone chargers
USB cable & power adapter for our kindles
USB cable for phone
ethernet cable
charger for Motorola Xoom
USB thumb drive
extra sdcard
Charger for Samsung Series 5 Chromebook
All of these items fit in a 10″ x 6″ case. One good thing about this is that having these items contained in one case made it easy to find each of these items. Also, my backback wasn’t loaded with a rats nest of wires.
I did put this case inside my checked bag, as I was sure that such a densely packed container of wires might have looked suspicious to the TSA agent watching the X-ray images.
ZuniConnect Travel IV
The ZuniConnect is a great travel router. It lets you connect to a wired or wireless network, and share that with multiple computers. It will share the network connection either via Ethernet or a 802.11g/n network. One our trip, my wife and I used the ZuniConnect to share the the hotel wired network connection with our two phones, our laptop, and our tablet.
There are some other nice features of the ZuniConnect:
Two USB ports to charge portable devices
The ZuniConnect can be used for a wireless network bridge to connect devices that only have an Ethernet port to connect to a wireless network.
Netflix recently changed their account pricing for their accounts that include streaming and DVDs. Here is a snippet from the email that I received:
Your current $17.99 a month membership for unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs (including Blu-ray access) will be split into 2 distinct plans:
Plan 1: Unlimited Streaming (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month
Plan 2: Unlimited DVDs (including Blu-ray), 2 out at-a-time (no streaming)
for $14.99 a month
Your price for getting both of these plans will be $22.98 a month ($7.99 + $14.99). You don’t need to do anything to continue your memberships for both unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs.
This got me thinking about how we have been using the Netflix service. We love Netflix streaming, especially since we cancelled our cable television service. Our kids can always find a kids show that they will like, and generally my wife and I can find something that we enjoy. But we haven’t been using the disc part of our service.
We have had the same two Blue-Ray discs sitting in our entertainment center for several months. Obviously, this is the type of customer that Netflix like, as they don’t have to pay for mailing costs, but are still receiving our monthly payment.
Often if we want to watch a recent movie, we will rent a movie through Amazon Video on Demand through our Roku box. The selection through Amazon is pretty good, especially for newer releases.
With the change in plan, I have taken the opportunity to downgrade our Netflix account to streaming only. Since we have been using Amazon Video on Demand for recent release, we won’t miss the discs. And in the cases that we want to get a movie on disc, we can always go to our nearest Redbox.
Microsoft announced several things at the opening keynote for the 2011 E3 conference and in a release. Personally, I am interested in some of the announcements:
Xbox Live Cloud Storage
Integrated search
Live TV features
Xbox Live Cloud Storage
With Xbox Live Cloud Storage, you should be able to keep your profile, and some game saves on the Xbox Live servers. This should allow you to go to any network connected Xbox, and log into your profile. This is better than the Gamertag recovery that you have to go through now. For users that choose to keep their profile online, I wonder what happens if the user tries to use the account when they aren’t online.
Integrated Search
I have mentioned before that it is hard to find a particular piece of content that you are interested in, especially with the various content provider. For example, if my kids wants to watch a movie, I currently look on Netflix, then Hulu, then in the Zune Marketplace. The new integrated search should make this easier.
Live TV
Microsoft is supposed to be providing access to live TV content. I don’t know which content partner they will be working with, but I am more interested in how open they allow this to be. For example, I want to be able to plug in the following sources into my Xbox
UPnP ATSC tuners
Windows Media Centers
Microsoft was promoting Kinect control of the Live TV experience. I hope that they also improve the experience when using an Xbox media remote control. This would reduce the barrier for switching to the Xbox in our house.
A few months ago, we replaced the head unit in our car with a Kenwood KVT-516. One problem that we have been having is that the in call volume is too low for phone calls. We would need to turn up the volume to hear the caller. Unfortunately, this would affect the volume of music, which would be pretty loud at the end of the call.
It looks like the latest firmware update solves this problem. Now the KVT-516 has separate volume settings for hands-free calls, and other audio sources.
I have used several third-party applications for to control my Squeezebox radios from my phones. They each have varying support for the different Squeezebox applications.
It looks like Logitech released their own controller application for Android. This is one of the nicest applications for controlling Squeezebox players. If you have configured applications, you can play content from them.
I do wish that you could add or change alarms from the application.
I have been interested in streaming content for a while. I have installed PlayOn and the tubeCore Windows Media Center plugin to view TV content. This is not an ideal experience.
With tubeCore, the user interface to browse the list of shows and episodes is pretty simple. For example, the meta data about the episodes is not shown. Also, I was never able to get reliable streaming though PlayOn and tubeCore. Often, I would need to try to play a stream twice in order for it to play successfully.
The Roku XD|S looked like it would be a perfect way to watch content that is available on-line. With the Roku, you have easy access to Netflix streaming, Amazon Video On Demand, Hulu and other content. I like the hardware, as it is very quiet, and is small enough for me to use on any of our TVs.
The setup was pretty painless, and I was up and running with several of the content providers within 30 minutes of starting the setup process. Where the content partners provided HD content, the picture quality was good.
We got a Kinect a few weeks ago, and have really been enjoying it. There are some interesting features/behavior of the implementation:
You can sign into your Xbox Live account with facial recognition, but if you have a PIN on your profile, you will only be logged into your local profile, but not logged in online.
While some games let use your avatar while playing, and some will use facial recognition to log into your account, I haven’t seen any game that will correctly choose a show more than one avatar, when two people are playing.
You are not able to use voice or hand controls to do everything in the dashboard. For example:
You can’t use voice or use your body to control Netflix playback
You can’t open the DVD tray with your voice.
You should definitely plan on redoing the KinectID calibration multiple times, to make the facial recognition work well.
I have mentioned PlayOn before, as the way that we are getting a lot of our television content. We use PlayOn to view content from Hulu and SyFy channel. Since PlayOn is a UPnP server , we are able to play this content on our Xbox or on our Media Center PC.
It looks like Roku is getting access to PlayOn content. The addition of the content that Roku already had, the addition of PlayOn, makes Roku a credible solution for cancelling cable or satellite service.
I am not sure if once you set the Roku up to access PlayOn content, if you need to leave the PC running to access the content.
allowed us to keep our assorted cables and accessories in a compact form. For this trip, we used it to store:
Paul's Time Sink 