When was the last time you turned on one of your consumer electronic devices only to find that it had magically acquired a pile of new features? Well for those of us who own a 360, this scenario is not strange, in fact we've come to expected it. And true to form Microsoft is prepping another whopper of an upgrade for this spring.

There are far to many new features and improvements to list here, but the biggest one being discussed is the integration with Windows Messenger. You'll be able to seamlessly chat between Messenger and 360 friends, from the console or a PC. Currently the 360 lets you text with either a USB keyboard or the on screen keyboard, but this summer they are releasing a 'texting' controller. This is a wireless 360 controller with a qwerty thumb-pad. I'm not so sure I'd be interested in the new controller, but being able to IM direct from the console will be very handy indeed. Currently I have to use IM to track down friends for games when they don't have their consoles booted up yet. Now I won't have to leave the 360 to do it.

There are a lot of other cool features to check out like improvements to the achievement system, the download system and parental controls to name a few. Some of the more exciting features are support for H.264 video and MPEG-4 Part 2 (simple profile) with 2 channel AAC LC. Also added is support for playing Windows Media protected content (wm-drm) streamed from a PC.  This is a pretty big deal as it opens the 360 up to streaming even more content from your PC. It may actually help drive H.264 and MP4 as the standards for archiving your video content since they can also be played by the Apple TV.

With this update, can it play divx/xvid? As for the messenger integration - meh, that's only like 3 years late. It's the first thing I thought of when I saw the friends list on Live.

The pre-update download system was terrible: once you kick off a download, you can't navigate away from the download screen without canceling it! How many processors are in that thing? Some of those downloads take a long time, it's irritating to have the screen basically locked to the progress page.

Here's what the download system needs: a slight transparent overlay of a download progress bar in a corner of the screen so that I can go play on Xbox arcade (Robotron 2084) until it finishes.

One more 'feature'...

Faster Marketplace Downloads

"Up to 3 times faster! Our Spring Update is adding speed to video downloads. But being faster is just the beginning. You can now fast-forward, pause and rewind videos, trailers and movies as they're being downloaded on Xbox LIVE Marketplace. All that plus more free content and promotions at Xbox LIVE Marketplace thanks to new sponsors."

Let me know when you have the xvid transmuxing working... :-)

I suppose I'll around to that eventually. I heard a couple rumors today that I can dispel/ though. The update did not break my current transcoding solution or the ability to play mpeg 2 files.

Grab your old 360 out of the trash. Looks like their extending the warranty to 3 years:

"Microsoft declined to detail the problems that have caused an onslaught of "general hardware failures" in recent months but said Thursday it will extend the warranty on the consoles to three years."

Story

Who needs Windows media center to stream content to the Xbox? All you need is a Mac and a copy of Connect360, a $20 application.

Seriously - nullriver? They trying to outdo the nullstream? Let's register nullclass5rapids.com! That program does look pretty good though. If you buy it, do a quick review. Doesn't look like it plays divx tho...

Well you dont need anything special to stream from XP. Just fire up parallels.

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