New Xbox Experience Hits Launch Day Snags (Updated: Netflix Issues Resolved)

New blades are nice, kind of borrowed from the PS3 to have one direction on the dpad be categories and another but subcategories within. Much better at holding lots of information, and is consistent vs the old blades left right sometimes being subselections and sometimes being blade selection.

Forced avatar selection is kind of lame, but oh well.

Netflix streaming was easy to set up, but the quality was worse than DVD. I'll give it another shot when their servers aren't hammered. I have pretty fast cable so I doubt it was on my end.

Installed a game but didn't get a chance to test it yet, it will be nice to play with the system a bit quieter though.

The guide seemed to come up at about the same speed, if not slower. I'm hoping it will be faster in games though I doubt it. I was hoping it would be much faster vs the chug of the old blades.

my dashboard keeps crashing after i come out of looking at a friends details...

Please take this suggestion and watch Dexter Season 1. Queue up the whole damn season and settle in for a very disturbing and thought provoking show. Season 2 isn't on instant yet so had to get those through netflix on disc. Season 3 is showing now on showtime or available through "alternatives".

Is there an easy list of the movies that are available in HD?

Generally speaking I like the update. Odd that you have to download the Netflix piece separately as well as the photo sharing feature. But, I guess that's a way to keep the download as small as possible and let those that want that stuff to download it.

The Netflix stuff works pretty good. Shame you can't add movies to your queue via the xbox. The new navigation is an improvement over the original (though there is still room for improvement). Right off I was able to find an HD stream. Season 1 of 30 Rock came up in HD. However, I haven't been able to tell which titles will be in HD before you actually stream them. That's kinda lame. You just have to hope you get lucky. Still, image quality was better than I was expecting on the non HD stuff. The HD episode I watched buffered quickly and started playing in a few seconds. Not bad. I could do HD like that no problem. Oh, one problem I ran into right away. Since the xbox is doing the video scaling you can't adjust the image size very well. I tried an anime title that only had subtitles, which I usually prefer, but between the image scale and my tv's overscan, the subtitles were sitting right at the bottom of the screen and I couldn't read all of them. L a m e. Until I get a display that can do dot-for-dot I'll have to pass on anything with a subtitle. That also showed me the current limit of streamed media: no options for different audio tracks or sending the CC as part of the stream and letting the display device decode and render to the screen. In time. They'll get it.

I gotta agree with Killrig. Covering up your wallpaper is pretty weak. But, I haven't explored all of the settings yet to see if you can tweak that.

The party stuff will have to wait until peeps get home from work. I threw out a few invites, but I couldn't tell if your friends have to be online for them to accept the invite to a party. No clue if the party persists when you bailout or turn off the console.

Now. To kill a bunch of demos and trailers to make room to install a game. Come on M$! Let us drop in a 500gb drive already. . .

Question: Does anyone know of a way to disable the large gray half-circle on the bottom portion of the NXE dashboard? It seems pretty unnecessary and just covers up the wallpaper.

Yes. I woke up early this morning before work to check out the update and see how the Netflix feature worked. Almost everything worked fine for me.. but at about 6:00am EST I tried to get Netflix working and it gives you and activation code and asks you to browse to the page on your PC and enter the code. The code wasn't accepted so I went back to the console and tried again... I did that about 10 times but it never worked. At about 6:30 I got a message on the PC saying the device activation service was down and to try back in two hours.

It sucks because that was really the main feature I was looking forward to... but I imagine it will get better after a couple days when things normalize a bit.

How many people are gonna signup for netflix just because of this? I know I took the 2 week trial and will probably keep it for the 10$ a month plan. Already have over 80 movies in my instant queue and almost 60 in my DVD queue. The choice of movies available for streaming is kind of hit or miss, but there are a bunch of older classics from the 70s and 80s.