Xbox Live gets goosed

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Once you've downloaded a themeor a trailer, you can now install or play it immediately from the download screen - no more fishing around the menus to find where the goodies landed. The Xbox Live Marketplace menus have been shuffled slightly, too, so movie trailers, game demos and episodes of Red vs. Blue are no longer uncomfortably smashed together (unless you want them to be). New categories like "Television, Music, Sports and More" and "Game Tips and Support Videos" suggest that Microsoft's got some more plans in the works.

Honestly, some of the new functionality really should have been there from the beginning. DVDs and downloaded videos now have basic fast-forward and rewind functions, up to 16x for fast, relatively smooth searching through movies. The industry-standard DVD resume works now, too, so if you stop a disc and come back to it later, you pick up where you left off. If you're playing music, either from a CD or hard-drive rips, a little equalizer icon shows the current track being played, a progress bar appears to show you how much of the track is left to play and the icon on the Shuffle button actually makes sense. Better still, if you're listening to a custom soundtrack, it keeps playing as you switch to game playing. We saw it in action - starting up Geometry Wars had utterly no impact on Jay Z's "Big Pimpin'."

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