New Xbox Live Experience Screenshot

So this is from Microsoft….It’s time to connect to your Xbox LIVE.

Start downloading the New Xbox® Experience to your Xbox 360® and enter the new era in social entertainment. You’ll have access to not only the best games, but also the best movies and TV shows in high definition. Every experience will be a shared adventure with your friends and family, in the same room or around the world. It’s an exciting world of online entertainment, so jump in and have fun!

Don’t miss out on anything:

• Explore the easy-to-use New Xbox Experience interface. It’s designed to help you find your favorite gaming and entertainment content. For instance, you can now browse the Marketplace alphabetically to find what you want quickly.

• Stream movies from Netflix® instantly on your Xbox 360 console. You’ll have more than 12,000 movies and TV shows at your fingertips, including high definition shows.

Download Games & Movies

• Select an avatar and start customizing from your nose to your toes (or at least your shoes). There’s a ton of options, from your standard body features to 200 clothing and accessory items. And you can keep your own gamer pic and themes.

Choose an Xbox Avatar

• Start an Xbox LIVE Party with up to seven of your friends. Voice chat while you play games, share photos, and comment in real-time. Jump in and out of games and other activities as a group while staying connected. It’s all one shared New Xbox Experience.

Everyone now has a custom avatar you can set up as soon as you download the update.  To check out mine add me as a friend won’t you?  My screen name is “awesome show”.  Maybe we can battle on GTA4 or the new Call of Duty “World at War”?

Customize Your Xbox Avatar In A Million Ways

New for Xbox and this holiday season:

In the Spotlight This Holiday
While Xbox 360 has evolved into a world-class entertainment device, it remains the best place to play. In concert with the launch of the New Xbox Experience, two entertainment heavyweights step into the spotlight, ready to wow audiences across the world. Today is the launch of Lips and You’re in the Movies, two games that promise to get you on your feet and performing like a star.

• Lips is an all new music franchise exclusively for Xbox 360. Lips is the only singing game that offers wireless, motion-sensitive microphones and the ability to sing to a diverse list of included songs representing multiple musical genres, ranging from pop, rock and dance to hip-hop, country and R&B, as well as compatible songs from your music collection. (Hmmmm, are your songs Lips compatible?)
• You’re in the Movies brings out the movie star in everyone this holiday season with its release exclusively on Xbox 360 November 18. It’s the first and only game of its kind that transports players into a magical world of cinema and hilarious improvisations. Using the Xbox LIVE Vision camera, friends and families choose a script, act it out and in minutes watch the often hilarious, always entertaining results.

All sounds pretty interesting… Read more about it here.

I stumbled on this great article while searching Google for “play xvids on xbox 360″ and it totally opened my world to a whole new entertainment experience, one that I’ve totally embraced,, haha.. Can you tell I’m excited?

The great folks over at Tweaktown.com have put together a great article for playing divx and xvid files on your xbox 360 from your computer. It totally opened my eyes and introduced me to Tversity.

Tversity is the media streaming software you’ll be using to stream/play movies on your xbox 360. And man does it work great! I followed the article exactly as it said and I was up and streaming movies and mp3′s in a snap.

Of course there are system requirements that need to be met if you want everything to work smoothly and they are pretty basic. Basically the faster your machine the better. I’m running a p4 3ghz dell with 1gb of ram and it works really well. Here are the requirements you need to meet quoted from Tversity’s site:

# The minimum requirements will allow real-time transcoding of media files with bitrates up to 300-400 kbps. Higher bitrates will require faster machines.
# Media files that do not require transcoding, i.e. can be played by the media hub as is, will work well on systems meeting the minimum requirements, disregarding their bitrate, and in fact can even work on slower machines.
# Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz with support for Hyper Threading and with 512 MB of memory is recommended for real-time transcoding of standard definition video (e.g. WMV 720×480 1.5Mbps).
# Dual core or dual CPU systems with 1 Gbyte of memory are required for real-time transcoding of high definition video.
# Non real-time transcoding of any bitrate video can be done on any machine, with the speed of the machine determining the time it takes to complete the transcoding.

To be able to play/stream all your different media types you will need the codecs for each one.

Transcoding of some file formats require the installation of third party directshow filters that are compatible with TVersity. TVersity recommends:

* ffdshow – for MPEG2/4, H.264, Divx, Xvid, AAC, FLAC, Vorbis, FLV, and many more
* Haali Media Splitter – for better MP4 and H.264 support and for OGG/OGM and Matroska.
* Real Alternative – for Real audio and video.
* Quicktime Alternative – for MOV.
* MP4 Source/Splitter* – for better MOV support.
* FLV Splitter* – required for FLV playback.
* AC3 Filter – recommended for better AC3 support (in which case AC3 should be disbaled in ffdshow).

After you’ve installed Tversity and installed all the required codecs, hooked up your xbox to your router you’ll be ready to start watching and listening to all the media on your computer without having to fork over more money to Microsoft for Media Center.

You can share whole folders in Tversity or just single files and you can even stream media to your xbox that is online… Image Feeds, Video Feeds or Audio Feeds etc. So you can listen to your favorite podcasts while lounging on the couch, browse your Flickr photos and watch Youtube videos all while relaxing. You simply have to tell Tversity where to grab the feeds and your set.

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate Tversity for producing this software. As the article from Tweaktown says, once you set everything up it only takes about 10 – 15 seconds for a movie to start playing on your tv, and it plays back flawlessly. I first thought you couldn’t fast forward your movie because it didn’t work for me the first time, but when I tried it a second time it actually worked. I can fastforward now fine which is something I thought you couldn’t do with streaming media. Again it all depends on the machine you are running.

To sum it up go get Tversity if you want to play and stream DivX, Xvid, WMV, AVI, MOV, RSS Feeds, Podcasts, MP3 Files on your xbox 360. It’s freakin sweet to say the least.

Oh and Tversity is totally FREE!

Have you given Tversity a try, let me know how you like it.  It’s 2011 and I’m still using it… but I’m now looking for an alternative method for movie streaming because my xbox 360 is way too loud.

Since he started his flickr gallery I had to jump on the bandwagon myself and start one up.  I’ve known about flickr for a long time but have always put it off, because I use picasa w/ hello to upload photos to my Oslo Pics site. I have to say I dig the interface of flickr and ease of use.  For $25/year you can upgrade your flickr account and upload up to 2gb’s worth of photos a month with unlimited bandwidth.  There’s a ton of people uploading photos and flickr makes it easy to meet other photographers.  So, give it a try if you haven’t already.  They do give you the ability to upload batches of photos but I haven’t tried it yet.  I need to get out and snap some more shots.