2022 Xbox in Review

In previous years, Microsoft provided tools to generate infographics that reflected the activity of Xbox players.  This year, Microsoft didn't make this tool available, but TrueAchievement has made their #MyYearOnXbox tool available that will generate a graphic with the gameplay information from an Xbox profile.

With the tool, you will need to sign into your Xbox account via OAuth, where it will read the games that you have played from your profile.

From my generated image, you can see that the game that I spent the majority of my time in was Far Cry 6 (while I was isolating when I had COVID)

[via Windows Central]

E3 Xbox Announcements

Microsoft announced several things at the opening keynote for the 2011 E3 conference and in a release.  Personally, I am interested in some of the announcements:

1. Xbox Live Cloud Storage


2. Integrated search


3. Live TV features

Xbox Live Cloud Storage

With Xbox Live Cloud Storage, you should be able to keep your profile, and some game saves on the Xbox Live servers.  This should allow you to go to any network connected Xbox, and log into your profile.  This is better than the Gamertag recovery that you have to go through now.  For users that choose to keep their profile online, I wonder what happens if the user tries to use the account when they aren't online.

Integrated Search

I have mentioned before that it is hard to find a particular piece of content that you are interested in, especially with the  various content provider.  For example, if my kids wants to watch a movie, I currently look on Netflix, then Hulu, then in the Zune Marketplace.  The new integrated search should make this easier.

Live TV

Microsoft is supposed to be providing access to live TV content. I don't know which content partner they will be working with, but I am more interested in how open they allow this to be.  For example, I want to be able to plug in the following sources into my Xbox

• UPnP ATSC tuners


• Windows Media Centers

Microsoft was promoting Kinect control of the Live TV experience.  I hope that they also improve the experience when using an Xbox media remote control.  This would reduce the barrier for switching to the Xbox in our house.

Rumor: Microsoft TV

There are rumors that Microsoft will introduce a video streamer box at CES this year:

http://twitter.com/#!/slashgear/status/22224742257790977

I think that this could be a pretty good product that I would like. I think that this could be something that would help simplify my setup.

Announcement hopes:

Here is what I hope the announcement will be:

• The box will be about the size of a Roku or Apple TV


• It would run a version of Windows that has been stripped to only allow Windows Media Center to run.
  
  
  
  • Windows Media Center already supports Netflix streaming
  
  
  • Windows Media Center plugins would still be allowed to run
  
  
  • This would help prevent software conflicts
  
  
  • The box would automatically update itself from Microsoft's servers
  
  
  
  


• These devices would also be Media Center Extenders
  
  
  
  • This would allow you to buy a few of them for a house, and be able to watch the same content in all rooms.
  
  
  
  


• There would be two SKUs.  One with a hard drive for content, and one that would only stream content from other sources.
  
  
  
  • The SKU with the hard drive would allow the user to store content, and playback from the local hard drive.
  
  
  
  


• These would also support Zune Marketplace to get access to video and audio content (as the Xbox 360 does).


• These devices would also be UPnP AV client.


• These would support USB or UPnP TV tuners, to allow viewing or recording (for the SKU that has the hard drive) of TV content.

Since Microsoft already has the Xbox, this device would need to be cheaper than the existing versions of the Xbox.  I would think that the version without the hard drive would be $100, and the version with the hard drive would be $200.

Pie-in-the-sky hopes:

Multiple accounts with Live Mesh

I am the tech support person for our family.  For my wife's grandmother, I installed a Windows Home Server in her house.  One of the features of the Windows Home server is that it is a proxy to allow you to RDP into the other computers on the network.  The problem is that this only works for the computers that have the RDP server enabled.  (i.e. Windows Vista Ultimate...)

Windows Live Mesh has a similar feature, but it doesn't have the requirement that the windows installations has its RDP server enabled.  Live Mesh's implementation requires that the Live Mesh client is installed on the computers that you want to access, and the computers that you want to do use to access them.  Once you have the software installed, you need to log into Microsoft's live server on each computer.  Then from any computer signed into a Live Mesh account, you can connect to any other computer also signed into that account.

The problem is that this doesn't really work well with multiple accounts.  For example, I have a Live Mesh account, and normally am logged into it when I log into my Windows account.  When I want to help out family, I need to log out of my account and then log into their account.  Ideally, Microsoft would add the ability for a Live account holder to be able to grant access to another Live account for a particular computer.