Microsoft had a fairly large (Media Center) presence at DigitalLife and I managed to sneak away Thursday for a bit to attend their press conference and visit the booth. In addition to educating the uninitiated in Media Center functionality, Microsoft also had new extenders on display ($300 and up from DLink, Linksys, and Niveus) and announced the public beta of Internet TV.
In the booth, MS reps had folks focus on the new extenders from their partners. I told them I already own an almost-great MCE extender in the 360, that all it needs to reach greatness is Divx and Xvid support. Bryan Koski, of the Windows group, went on to tell me that Media Center functionality is pretty much a self-contained chunk of code… Whatever powers the new extenders should ultimately end up intact on the 360. He didn’t know (or wouldn’t say) if that meant this fall or down the road, but he seemed fairly confident all new functionality would be retained in any 360 update.
Sadly, no. That “chunk of code” has nothing to do with writing and licensing brand new decoders for the Xbox 360 Extender.
Now, if you are developing an Extender off something like a Sigma chipset, different story.
Damn, I was hoping he was right in that it’s portable. Maybe he’s right, but just kept it high-level since I’m kinda slow? ;) It was odd that the people in the booth weren’t really MCE experts, just loaners from a different Windows group. They did give me the PR person’s card for follow-up, but PR folks probably know less and would be instructed to spin things vaguely. Keep pressing Belfiore on our behalf, Chris!
(I’m not worried about the licensing side of things… MS has deep pockets.)
There is no reason that a box with the processing power of the 360 couldn’t decode any video format via software, just as your PC does, and not hardware. Wii has recently added support for Xvid and DivX in this way.
Considering the overlap of file sharers and gamers I don’t see how MS can continue to not support this demand and compete. I guess they are avoiding it so far in order to sell their internet movies to xBox owners in DRMed proprietary format. If they start to lose console market share they’ll do a quick 180 on the 360s supported formats.
@Dave L
At what point exactly did the Wii add support for Divx and Xvid? I must have missed that. If by adding support you mean converting the files to be read on the pictures channel with Wii Video 9(which converts 30 minutes into about 800MB), then that is not really what we are after here since most people are able to convert their AVIs to WMV on the fly with the 360. Instead we are asking that the XBox handle this natively.