360 Dashboard update arrives

Last week,we reportedon the new upgrade hitting Xbox 360 Dashboards this week. It's live now, and as promised, only takes about a minute to download. Among the highlighted additions are background downloading, more functionality for the DVD and CD players and support for the upcoming Xbox Live Vision digital camera (slated for a September release). We sifted through thecomplete listand discovered a few other notables that weren't previously mentioned by Microsoft.

Some of our favorite upgrades include the 360's newfound ability to "up-sample" DVD playback when using the optional VGA adaptor to connect your 360 to a computer monitor, which boosts the clarity of your DVDs for the high-resolution monitors. The convoluted system that made changing your Dashboard Theme a puzzling ordeal has been refined to allow changes to be done from the "System" blade or immediately after downloading a theme directly from the download screen. File copying and moving has been streamlined and sped up too, and while it's small, it's nice to see that playback of mono AAC audio files has been improved - that's podcasts in real-world terms.

If you haven't already received the update, you will be prompted to install it next time you log into Xbox Live.

June 6, 2006