The world as frankps sees it!
Posts tagged XBOX 360
Lips for XBOX 360
33 years ago
I am not much a gamer, and not a singer either. But having said that, I must add that I simply love the karaoke game Lips for XBOX 360. I saw a commercial of the game, where they played Young Folks (by Peter, Bjorn & John) and I was sold. I just had to buy the game and it was released just in time for the holiday season.
My sister and her boyfriend are SingStar champions, but now I can finally be at least an outsider. I can’t wait to compete against them. It’s a social game, fun singing alone, but so, so much better singing with others.
I guess Lips isn’t the greatest karaoke-focused game ever released, but it has enough good features and options to make it a decent Xbox 360-only answer to Sony’s massive SingStar series. As I am not the best singer, I fast noticed that the game has problems with rating your vocals. The game gave me full credit, even though I was pretty far off the mark. Ok, it’s Christmas time and hope that I will get time for practise, cause I am surely not ready to challenge other players online.
The game comes with 40 tracks that cover a good-sized range of times and genres, so there should be something for everyone! I at least found 5-6 really great songs. But I hope that Microsoft with the next version of Lips, adds 3-4 Norwegian songs too. Swedish songs are not the same!It varies a little bit what songs Lips comes with, on Wikipedia you can see the differences between countries. Another option is the option to buy extra songs online. Songs are available for either 160 or 180 MSP (Microsoft’s own currency). You can see the list of songs available on Microsoft Live Marketplace. I hope to some time be able to compare the Microsoft Live Marketplace with Sony’s SingStore, but get me right, I am not planning to buy a Playstation 3.
Lips also lets you import music via the same options you have to play your own music in most other games. You can pull songs from portable devices, play them from your 360′s hard drive, or even stream them over your local network (Windows Media Center or Connect 360). Just that it isn’t the same as playing the songs built for the game, since you won’t get on-screen lyrics or music videos. The game will only attempt to judge your performance.
It gets better, just hold on! When you first import a song from a portable device, Lips asks you the following question:
“You’re about to use a song from your own music library. Do you want to send data about this song along with an ID associated with your Gamertag to Microsoft? By doing so you’ll cast a vote for the creation of additional content such as videos and lyrics for your favourite songs. Providing this information will also let us notify you when new content for songs in your collection is available.”
Brilliant way to combine the Xbox and Zune, and get their sales numbers going also for the Zune. Microsoft currently has a position open for “Zune Xbox“.
Just as I was about to finish this blog entry, a SingStar Vol. 3 commercial was running on TV, more or less telling me what that game has that Lips doesn’t. Not that it matters for me, but SingStar has the ability to save small videos, captured with the PlayStation Eye, and upload them for the community and your friends to see. The recording of your singing also lets you listen to your performance. Lips doesn’t have anything like this, but I guess Microsoft will catch up on Sony. I am pretty sure!
Great XBOX 360 update ahead
03 years ago
by frankps
in Game Console
Later this autumn Microsoft will release a bigger firmware update for the XBOX 360, and they recently released a video of how to create avatars through the new interface:
The improved interface looks awesome!
From AirPort Express to Apple TV
3I have just bought Apple TV 40 GB (previously known as the “iTV”) as a replacement for Apple Express, and spent most of the weekend to rip my CD collection (320 Kbps) and synced it over to the Apple TV, and then packed down all the CDs in plastic boxes and put the CD player in the bottom of a locker. They are not to go back up on the shelf!
Aardman Production on Joost!
14 years ago
I was quite fast on signing up on Joost. The project was called “The Venice Project” in it’s early days, and it is another project from the guys behind Skype. In the beginning the service was lacking intersting content, but as this is now changing I am using it more and more. Today I discovered that there was even a Aardman Production channel, the studio behind the successes Creature Comfort and Wallace & Gromit.
I find Joost far more interesting then videocast services like the Democracy player, and I have by now more or less stopped using the Democracy player. The technology behind Joost is impressive, it is in short P2P (peer-to-peer) done right! The perfect platform for pushing HDTV content. The application downloads approximately 320Mb of data an hour and uploads about 105MB an hour. A broadband connection is therefor required. Joost is not pulling all of the video from a central server, instead it speeds up the download process by allowing videos to be pulled form other Joost locations that are closer to you. This makes the quality of the Joost broadcast service so impressive. I love watching it on my Mac, but it isn’t enough. I want to stream it to my TV as well. I heard something about that being possible with Apple TV, but what about the XBOX360? Appearently it is possible with the Media Center included in some of the versions of Vista. I hope it in the future also will be possible with a Mac, for instance through Connect360.
Another impressive thing is that Joost is very much based on open source technology. The application is based on Mozilla’s XULRunner engine, which basically means it’s cross-platform. Joost also has a inbuilt Instant Messenger service, and that is using the Jabber protocol (and not Skype)! The application is currently only available for Windows (also Vista) and MacOS X, but a Linux player will be made available later. If you are using Linux, and can’t wait for the client to arrive, people have been able to get Joost with Wine on Ubuntu. Their servers are running Ubuntu with Apache.
Do you want to learn more about the future of TV? Thought so, but then you need an invite. And guess what, I have some invites to give away! Please send me an e-mail.
More Information about the program.
Title : Morph Smart: Paint Job
Description : Morph plays a trick but it’s Chas who has the last laugh
Do I need Apple TV?
14 years ago
It’s time to upgrade my XBOX 360 with Microsoft’s latest patch. The new features are mainly the video codecs H.264 and MPEG4. Nullriver Software was out with updating their Connect360 for MacOS X. Version 3.0 is now released with support for the two new video codecs, including full HD (1920×1080) H.264 in both the MPEG-4 and QuickTime containers (in addition to the previous WMV). This is substantially higher than Apple TV’s support for 720p video, making the Xbox 360 the best full HD video extender available. It is of course also possible to share iTunes Podcasts to the Xbox 360. Great, I now just need a new TV!
None of the devices are perfect, just as the XBOX360 is known for being disappointingly loud, the AppleTV is getting extremely hot! Apple TV’s advantages are firstly that the XBOX360 cannot decrypt iTunes DRM and that the XBOX360 has cluttered menus when using anything else then a Windows version with Media Center as the UPnP server.
Hm, I have been playing a bit with the solution. And it is not working satisfyingly! Most podcasts crashes and some times they even freeze the XBOX. I ripped 10 short movies from a DVD with Handbrake and streamed them. That worked far better, but also then I experienced a crash.
I will be trying this also from my Vista Ultimate installation to see if the problem is the codecs or Connect360. But so far, I am clueless on what the problem can be…