Xbox 360 is One Upgrade Away From Taking Over My Living Room
Posted by Keith Elder | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on 06-01-2007
I’ve only had my Xbox 360 for a few weeks and since I got it I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with it. In my usual geek curiosity fashion I’ve been going through every single screen, menu and configuration option. I’ve played games on Xbox Live, downloaded new arcade games for free from Xbox Live, and even rented a movie (Mission Impossible III) by downloading it with some Microsoft points from the Xbox Marketplace. I even connected it to my Media Center running Vista and streamed live TV and watch some recorded shows.
It then started to hit me. The Xbox is an upgrade away from taking over my living room. If it JUST was a DVR to boot I would kick my media center PC out of my living room and place the Xbox front and center. Will I ever see it happen, I doubt it, although the rumor mill is churning around the next release of the Xbox 360 from CES which is suppose to have a bigger hard drive (120gb) and HDMI support.
Honestly, the ONLY reason I have a media center PC running is to record TV. With one upgrade of a CableCARD and dual HD Tuners the Xbox 360 could be the killer device to have in the home. It would also have the largest DVR install base surpassing Tivo and others. Play games, download movies, watch and record TV all in one unit. Surely some of the folks at Microsoft have thought the same thing. The market is ripe for the taking if someone released a DVR to record HD TV and combine all the cutting edge devices and all of the high-end TVs that are being sold which do 1080i or 1080p.
The Xbox community has already added this functionality to their Xbox’s by modding them up to run Media Center. We are so close to having the ultimate converged device I can’t stand it. How long will I have to wait?
Xbox 360 IPTV Video
It is a good game. Apparently it can over heat your Xbox if you play it more than 2 hours. Search the internet for “gears of war ring of death”.
With 500GB drives approaching $150 each, I prefer the seperate media center as well. Slap two in there and you’ve almost got a terabyte media server for your various media center extenders. On another note, played “Gears of War” at whineyho’s lastnight, very cool game.
AG, I stand by what I said. ANY device that records TV will at some point need to be restarted. It may be because the power goes out (not even your beloved MythTv can run without power). Or maybe in your case a kernel update or re-compile (you do plug all those kernel security holes even on your DVR right?) is needed. At some point, you ARE going to have to restart the device.
I don’t know if you’ve ever sat down and played with an Xbox 360 (knowing your background as I do, I am going to go out on a limb and say you haven’t) but it starts up in just a matter of seconds. Restarting isn’t a big deal.
Media Center has always had the programming guide built it and pulls it automatically from the Internet. It also pulls other information such as DVD covers for recorded shows, movie information, actor information and more. That is nothing knew.
There are other questions that need to be answered before it becomes a DVR like the added cost, recording while gaming, disc storage (right now 20GB isn’t going to cut it), recording HD TV as an option. Lots of other things to consider obviously other than just restarts.
‘any device that records tv must be restarted..’ Um not exactly, if you use a mythTV box you don’t need to reboot at all. Much of the programming guide updates are handled via RSS feeds (XML).. Regarding stability, well I don’t want to get into that discussion 😉
Etsolow, you make a valid point but for the most part but let me ask you a question. Why would you want to spend $800 on another device just to record TV when a simply upgrade on an existing piece of hardware could provide the same experience?
Any device that records TV has to be restarted because of updates whether it is Tivo or Media Center. And to your point, the Xbox 360 wouldn’t be any different in that respect. Maybe a better question would have been “Can the Xbox handle playing games while recording?” Possibly that is something better to discuss?
Any piece of technology has to be restarted.
I don’t get it. Why do you need the XBOX 360 to be a DVR when your Vista MCE box is one, and can stream to the XBOX 360? I’d *rather* have the functions separated like that… do you want to miss a show recording because you had to reboot your XBOX 360 for some unrelated reason?