johng Blog

In the latest Xbox 360 dashboard update they added support for Xvid aka DivX aka MPEG-4 ASP at long last. I finally had the opportunity to try it out this week and so far I’m very impressed. For some reason it isn’t included as standard in the dashboard and requires a 2.5mb download of the “Optional Media Update” which you are prompted to fetch when it encounters a suitable file. Once you have this the 360 will read AVIs off DVDs, CDs, USB drives and over your network with very little trouble. All the files I tested worked as documented in the above link with no playback issues at all and while it doesn’t support AVIs with an AC3 track it will playback 720p Xvids no problem.

Good work MS it’s great to see this feature finally working, just keep the codec machine churning and eventually we will have a fully functional media center :-). Next on the agenda Matroska containers with x264 encoded video please!