Xbox Video Marketplace – My Full Review

This is NOT going to be another complaint about long and ineffective support calls, and horribly slow downloads. There is enough Microsoft bashing on the internet this week, and I’ve done my fair share.
It seems that Microsoft has made good strides in the last few days at resolving their performance issues. I’ve been reading positive reports of people getting their refunds in just a few minutes over the phone. And I have personally seen that the bandwidth issues are improving. I also expect these guys to implement fixes to their billing problems ASAP.

So for the rest of the article I’m going to ignore the bandwidth and stability issues. Microsoft already knows what’s wrong and they also know how to fix it. And it DOES seem more stable in the last 36 hours than it did on launch day.

My overall impression so far – it’s not a bad service. We rented one HD movie (V for Vendetta) and purchased a few TV shows. We’ve spent a few hours watching stuff, and it’s actually pretty good viewing experience.

The interface is simple and straigtforward. The XBox dashboard and the marketplace are very intuitive and easy to use. Some people mistaken intuitive with “easy to implement”. But as a Software Designer myself, I appreciate good work when I see it. Overall, finding what you want and purchasing it a uncomplicated and simple. I’m not sure how well it will work when their video library gets larger, but I will refrain from complaining until then.

Some interesting observations:

• It seems that the best download speeds we are getting right now are close to 1Mbs. I think many cable and DSL customers may have issues getting anything faster anyways, regardless of how fast Microsoft’s network may be. This is a decent download rate for TV shows in SD. For most shows, we can start watching them just a few minutes after purchase.
• The HD content seems to be encoded at 6Mbs of video and audio. For HD shows, expect a typical download to take at least 3x-6x the length of the show or movie. (2 hours = 6-12 hour downloads!). If you like your content in HD, then be prepared to download a day ahead of showtime.
• Some people have a console feature to “auto-shutoff” your XBox after 6 hours. You MAY want to disable this if you plan on downloading a lot of HD movies and TV shows.
• Your 14 video rental period starts when you PURCHASE the movie, not when you hit play. If it takes two days to download, you lose two days of your rental period. Once you hit play, your license is now changed to a mere 24 hours.
• However, even AT these speeds, it’s already seems much easier to download via XBox live, than it is via bittorrent. For SD content, Xbox Live beats bittorrent already. (expect of course for price). I don’t think bittorrent is going away. iTunes has flourished despite how easy it is to steal MP3s. People will pay, as long as it’s reasonable, easy, and fast. In the end it should be good for Hollywood AND good for consumers.
• You CAN start watching content before it is finished downloading (you can’t do that on bittorrent), but you are NOT allowed to fast-forward or rewind. Fast-foward I understand, but why can’t you rewind? That makes no sense. It’s frustrating.
• I used both an IR remote control and wireless XBox controller. Overall the pause,rewind, FF, and play operations are fast and responsive. They don’t seem sluggish like other players I’ve seen.
• For my HD Movie, the rewind SUCKED. It’s not smooth at all. It’s hard to judge when it’s gone back enough. I may too used to using Tivo, but the XBox rewind was very clunky. It seems worse than when I play a DVD in the Xbox. My guess is that they are using a very large sized GOP (Group of Pictures) when compressing the video. All video compression algorithms tend to compress a “group” of pictures, with a full frame described at the beginning of the group, and “difference” frames for each subsequent frames. Fast Forward is not that hard to do, since it just involves decoding the frames faster than realtime. Going backwards is harder, since the compression is designed to decoded in a forward manner. Early DVD players also tended to have horrible rewinds also, usually done by just showing the first picture in each GOP. Larger GOPs mean greater compression, but fewer frames can be used for rewind operations. They need a MUCH better implementation of rewind. I don’t need to see people walking backwards, but it would be nice if I had a few more frames a second.
• Also when rewinding, the audio would get out sync or I would get a frozen video frame for a few seconds. Another sign that they are using large GOP sizes. Either the Xbox 360 doesn’t have the processing power to do a real rewind operation, or they engineers did a pis-poor job of implementing one.
• The video quality was good overall for V for Vendetta. It didn’t seem as sharp or vivid as some HD presentations I’ve seen, but it looked at least as good as DVD and in some scenes a little better. I’m assuming it’s a VC-1 encoded 720p presentation. I’m sure that an HD-DVD or Blu-ray disk would give you a more impressive picture. But there isn’t a better picture available in a video download service today.
• I do NOT know what the audio format was. Our setup is currently only the Analog stereo outputs, but it was loud and responsive. My wife complained that the movie was too loud, so it gets positive points in my book. I’ll be setting up a 5.1 AC3 setup soon, but this movie will expire before I have it setup. I do NOT know if it’s an 5.1 audio track or not.
• The “chapters” on my movie (V for Vendetta) were poorly done. It seems like they just created a “chapter” every 30 seconds, and they never began or ended on a scene break.
• The fast forward would only go to 8x. Combine with the lousy “chapter” definitions it was VERY difficult to skip quickly to the end of the movie. There is no menu structure like you might have on a DVD, so the movies a little trickly to jump around. They either need to give us a much higher speed FF (like 30x or 60x) or at least make fewer chapters (like one ever 3 minutes instead of every 30 seconds).
• If you have to stop watching your video in the middle of the story, the XBox does remember where you left off. If you exit a movie to play a game or shut off your console, when you return to your video, you get a nice “resume” button to pickup where you left off. That’s a nice touch.
• The “Preview” option for the videos is nice, but makes you watch the video inside a small box. Some previews seemed VERY small. It should really give you a full-screen experience even for the preview. I could barely make out much detail, even my HD screen. For TV shows, the previews seem to be the first 30 seconds (which is often a lot of credits). Movies previews seem to give you original film trailers.
• I CANNOT figure out if there is any sort of Closed Captioning support. There doesn’t seem to be on my HDTV. It may be that CC could work via a 480i output, but I get nothing when I enable CC on my TV. Of course it’s rare to see working CC in some HD setups anyways. If you like captions with your video you may be out of luck. (Would LOVE to have somebody show me how to turn it on if I’m wrong!).
• SD Widescreen content DOES seem to be upscaled to 1080i, and displayed in Widescreen HD. There is clearly some detail missing, but the quality is entirely watchable.
• I DID purchase a video and try to download it – even though I didn’t have space on the hard drive. I DID get a nice error message in the active downloads. After deleting a demo, the download automatically started working. That was very well done. It’s clear that Microsoft is VERY aware that it’s difficult to manage video content on a 20G drive.

Since we have two XBoxes it was important to some other tests. Some interesting observations about “sharing” your video between two XBoxes:

• You CANNOT move a movie rental to any other XBox than the one it was originally purchased on. If you swap XBox hard-drives you can still see the movie listed, but it has a “no license” error. Hitting play just results in a license error.
• You CAN move a TV purchase between two XBoxes. If you download a TV show, then pop out your hard-drive and take it over to your buddy’s XBox, the video WILL play, as long as you do two things: 1) You MUST also move the profile that purchased the video. If you are like most people, and just store your profile on your HD, than this isn’t a problem. If you store your profile on a memory card, than make sure to bring it along. and 2) You MUST be connected to the internet. That’s because you will ALSO see the “no license” when you first navigate to your video purchase, but as soon as you hit “play” to get the system to automatically download a new license for the file.
• If you go to the “Memory” manager on the Xbox Dashboard, you DO have options to “Move” both purchases and rentals. But since my smallest video was over 100Mb, and my memory card is only 64Mb, it was a futile exercise. Even with the new 128MB MU card coming out, this seems less than useful. I could NOT move the files to an external FAT32 hard drive.

Overall – It’s a pretty decent service. My BIGGEST complaint is the lousy rewind, but it’s functional. It has 2 major advantages over iTunes:

• The Video quality is MUCH better. I think the SD quality may even be better than some iTunes video’s I’ve seen. But since I haven’t been able to watch iTunes videos on my HDTV, it’s hard to judge.
• I can watch video downloads on my TV, not my iPod or Computer. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but when I was little, we watched our mind-numbing TV shows, while sitting on our asses on the coach. The prices could better, but

Things they need to improve:

• Let me REWIND! If I start to play the video, before it’s done, there is no REASON I shouldn’t be able to rewind. I understand not being able to fast forward, but rewinding should be inalienable right!
• Give me a smoother rewind You should cache at least the last few minutes of video frames. I keep over shooting or under shooting where I want to rewind too. It may be that the CPU in the XBox is not powerful enough for it, but I hope I’m wrong.
• Previews should be in full screen mode. Even if the video res is going to be less than SD. I would probably not always pick the first 30 seconds for TV shows, since you tend to waste most of the preview watching credits (depending on the show).
• Give me a FASTER way to jump to the end of a show or movie. Either make the chapters bigger, so I can just hit “next chapter” or give me a super speed FF (60x please!).
• Closed Captioning please?
• Don’t charge me a rental fee if I don’t hit play! I would probably download a few movies (if they didn’t take up half my disk space) and leave them lying around if I wasn’t charged a fee. I’m sure that Microsoft is worried about their DRM being cracked (with good reason i’m sure). So we may never see this.
• What’s with the Empty Show Categories? A few shows- Day Break and Family Guy – have NO EPISODES. Than why even list them!
• More HD SHows! CSI get’s HD treatment, but why not Veronica Mars or Studio 60? I’m hoping that’s a temporary situation. Maybe MS is limiting HD content until their bandwidth problems ease up. ALL their movies could be HD, but many aren’t. But the ONE THING that MS has in this services, is that they have HD content. They need to expand that content as soon as they can.
• Turn Off the XBox after downloads finish. Since the XBox fan noise IS distracting, especially when my TV is off, I really don’t want to leave it on for longer than I need to. Plus – it’s environmentally friendly! (That XBox has one monster power supply!).
• BIGGER HARD DRIVE please. Or even better: Let me store my purchases on my own external USB hard drive!
• PC Playback? Why not move the files to my hard drive, and play them back on the PC. It think that you work on some mechanism where the video files can be moved, but the license keys could be re-downloaded direct from the internet. My guess is that IF we see this feature, it will be for Vista only. (And maybe also Zune compatibility!).
• More Movies, More shows. In the end all this fancy hardware and software is useless unless Microsoft can add some more content.

But overall, it’s a very good first version. I’m not a big fan of DRM closed systems, but in the end it’s all about price,features and content.