The Official Xbox 360 Dashboard/Update Thread - Page 28

Correct.

As far as I know, all HD Zune video since it's been called Zune have always had 10 Mbps 1080p encodings. Before Zune it was called the XBL Video Marketplace and the HD titles were 6.6 Mbps 720p, with no available streaming (download only); some of those pre-Zune titles might be still be limited to 720p (I remember downloading 300 and Hard Candy this way; 300 now has a 1080p stream and Hard Candy has no streaming preview so I can't tell if there's 1080p or not).

Just go into the Zune player, pick a category (like New Release), pick something from the list and play the preview (select the window to blow it up full-screen) and press the right shoulder button on a pad or the INFO button on a remote to see the overlay.

I took your suggestion and searched for 1080 on YouTube and came up with a list of 1080p clips. Play one and press INFO on a remote to see the overlay; there doesn't seem to be a single button command on the pad to get the simple info overlay (the shoulder buttons are mapped to something else)--you can press START, choose the double up arrow for More Options and choose Info Pane.

If I can find a 1080p clip on YouTube that's longer than 10 minutes, I can play it while monitoring bandwidth consumption and determine its 10 minute average bit rate when played at 1080p in the PC player and then determine its average bit rate when played on the Xbox. I'll see if I can find one.

Did it, using a 16:10 long clip called "Skyrim TV #20" (or something like that), a demo of a role playing games called Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It appears that 1080p in the PC player runs at around 4.8 Mbps and both 720p on the PC player and HD on the Xbox runs at about 2.8 Mbps, so I would say that the Xbox is playing the 720p version of the clip.

MS really seems to have decided that no streaming service other than their own Zune Video will stream 1080p to the Xbox.

I am also having terrible black levels in the HBO Go app. My other video apps look fine.
Another issue is that it randomly scrambles my playlist order, and has no way to sort the playlist.

So is the Netflix black level problem solved now? Last I checked it still had crappy blacks.

Netflix looks like crap!!! Tried watching it last night and It's all washed out and now I have pretty bad lip sync.. this sucks...

The lip sync issue could be your surround system

It only just started after the update. My setup Never had any A/V lag until now. I used my surround sound processor to to fix it, had to put it back 80 ms for the A/V to match. When I go play a game I have to remove the delay or else the audio is behind the video x.x

I've had audio sync issues with Netflix streaming on some devices from time to time and if I hit the left arrow button to go back a little and start again it will usually sync up.

Thank you for all your hard work. It's interesting to me it only takes 4.8 Mbps to stream 1080p (though compressed when compared to other sources.) Still, it's disappointing they've chosen to limit most internet services to 720p.


Have you or anyone else seen 1080p from the Zune service? If so, how does that look (while playing 1080p sources?)

Gotcha

I explained how you can try it yourself in that post before the one that you quoted. You'll probably have to have something in excess of 9 Mbps available bandwidth on your connection to MS' servers to get it.

Forum member msgohan has an HDMI capture card which he's used to collect screenshots of matched frames from various different streaming services and BDs for comparison. If you don't have the bandwidth to check out 1080p Zune trailers on your machine, you can see a set of those screenshots which include some 1080p Zune video in this post. To compare, load them into separate tabs of a browser window (with no other tabs on the window), hit F11 to blow it up fullscreen and flip between them with CTRL-TAB. (I use Chrome for this because its fullscreen mode is truly fullscreen, with no borders whatsoever. I like to compare the facial close-ups because there's so much fine discernible detail in human faces). To my eye Zune video is the winner in that set (from some scenes of episodes of The Firm), slightly sharper than even VUDU.

Glad I'm not the only one having this strange black level issue. It's only happening in HBOGO. If you come across a solution, please post about it.

I have the bandwidth, however I don't know if Zune is a service I would have to pay extra for. I don't want to get locked into a service I wouldn't use.

The Zune Video Marketplace on the Xbox is not a service that you have to sign up for. Anyone can casually run the Zune player and watch as many trailers as they want without paying a cent. It's only when you choose to rent or buy one that you're charged and you have to confirm that you accept the charge--it would be very difficult to do by accident.

Did you try comparing the screenshots I linked to?

HBO Go on Xbox 360 may be coming soon for Comcast customers
http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/04/h...t-coming-soon/

Its about time they did this. Xfinity HBO lack a lot of shows.

Ok, I finally tried the Zune player and saw the list of trailers. The trailers look gorgeous! And when I went to the "overlay," I could see most of them were at 1080p (at least the ones I picked.) There were a few that were only listed as HD...(I would assume those are 720p.)

The point is, they looked better than most anything I've seen on the Youtube site as those videos (even the best) look slightly compressed when compared to the videos on Zune.

I would say the trailers on Zune look close to the trailers I see on DirecTV channels such as HDNet (etc.) And of course Blu-ray looks even better.

Still for streaming, I was very impressed with what I saw. Over time as encodes for higher quality video compression and less bandwidth is needed (along with more powerful decoders...) it can only get better!



I don't think I've seen your screenshots. Unless it's different than what I started to go to...however even with virus scanners, I still won't download a .exe file. Sorry... If your talking about something different, I'd be happy to compare screen shots.

Now I'll have to contact Micosoft and/or Youtube to see if they can start letting 1080p content play on the Xbox 360 from that service.

What do you mean "listed"? What titles were those?

They should--1080p Zune video is encoded at twice the bit rate, about 10 Mbps versus YouTube's 4.8 Mbps (1080p Netflix and 1080p iTunes are also 4.8 Mbps).

Go back and read the second paragraph of this post. No .exe's, just .png files hosted on ImageShack.

. Good luck with that . I truly believe that the lack of 1080p in any video other than Zune is completely deliberate. People have complained about it and AFAIK Microsoft hasn't responded (as they did respond to the black level complaints).

Received an update for hbo go tonight.

Black level is good now.

Yup!

Now when is Netflix going to get their act together? Silly that the most used app is the one lagging behind still.

Those trailers as being listed as "HD" compared to trailers listed as "1080p" in the overlay display. The "HD" must mean 720p while "1080p" obviously means full HD.

That's true, but it's only a limit if there is no greyed out 1080p icon. The presence of the icon means that there is a 1080p encoding and that you're not getting it at the moment because the player's not able to keep its buffer full of that, either due to currently insufficient bandwidth on your connection to the server (as opposed to the rated speed of your service) or the server being too loaded to keep shoveling the higher bit rate content to you fast enough.

I'm getting the sync problem as well. Also the sound seems screwed up. It reads as a DD 5.1 signal, but the dialog which should be coming from the Center channel seems spread between all the front speakers, and just sounds bad. All other Dolby Digital content on my 360 works perfect and sounds great.

There is a new Netflix App update.


http://majornelson.com/2012/04/09/ne...-on-xbox-live/

Bout time the Black levels were fixed...

hahaha...I like how they are trying to tout these as new feature updates. This is simply an update that restores things were broken or inexplicably removed in the Metro update. Also, what's the point of the video preview that pops up when you hover over a title for a few seconds?

It is exactly that a video preview. What needs to be explained about that lol?

HBOGo is now available to Comcast subscribers for the 360.