Yesterday marked the release of Microsoft’s Fall (2007) Dashboard Update for the Xbox 360. While it it’s not exactly, or even technically, Fall anymore, I still welcome updates to the Xbox 360 Dashboard since they only offer them up twice per year.

While there are a few features like friends-of-friends and enhanced profiles that may be useful, and Xbox Originals which could potentially provide some inexpensive additional fun if they didn’t require purchasing another hard drive, what I was really looking for was the video enhancements.

Although I enjoy the weekly Gears of War, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and Halo 3 bloodbaths with the guys, the primary use for my Xbox 360 is actually as our entertainment system. The Spring (2007) Dashboard Update brought much-needed support for MPEG-4, H.264, and AAC video & audio formats which made it an excellent addition to our Mac-based household. Nullriver’s Connect360 software fro Mac OS X was then was able to stream our iTunes music, iPhoto photos, and all our MP4 videos to the Xbox 360 and thus our 1080p LCD TV.

This latest update has added support for further MP4 video codecs and the AVI container. This is less of a concern for me as I try to encode everything with H.264, but it does mean that videos from my digital camera can now be played natively. A nice little bonus.

However, it’s the User Interface changes that have both enhanced and curtailed my overall Xbox 360 experience.

First, the good. They’ve redesigned the Xbox LIVE Marketplace so that it’s easier & faster to browse. They’ve also added full-screen streaming previews, which is a very welcome improvement. And, what threw me at first, they changed around the way you select your music/photo/video source.

I thought it was going to be a pain in the ass and confusing, but it actually works fairly well and has one major bonus: multiple computers are now automatically displayed in the source list! Previously, you could connect to a computer (e.g. one of our Macs running Connect360) from the source list, but if you wanted to switch to a different one then you had to go to System -> Computers -> Disconnect and then back to the source list and search for a computer to connect to. Now it’s automagical:

Unfortunately, with User Interface change comes User Interface blunder. The one that I’ve noticed and is almost a show stopper: they now truncate video filenames on portable devices (e.g. my USB hard drive). They used to shorten filenames by replacing the middle of the string with an ellipse (...), but now they just unceremoniously chop them off.

Can you tell which South Park Season 10 Episodes each of the following are? I can make some guesses because I’ve watched them so frequently, but really there’s no point in trying.

Fortunately, I can just rename the files to alleviate the issue, but it’s still a shame that they had to go from graceful solution to an inelegant and perplexing one.

Overall I do like the update, but there’s one thing that I’ve been waiting for the Xbox 360 to support that I have yet to see: DVD upscaling.

I have a large collection of DVDs and my Xbox 360 is configured to run in 1080p mode since I have a 1080p LCD TV. The problem is that every time I pop in a widescreen DVD—which, let’s face it, is the preferred format of DVD—I have to switch the TV to stretch the DVD to fit. Why? Because the Xbox 360 switches to the native resolution, but still sends the video in anamorphic (squashed horizontally) format.

If only they’d support upscaling of DVDs, I’d be all set!