XBOX 360 First Impressions (Part III)

So far, the 360 has proven itself to be a worthy purchase. The games are decent, the console is powerful, and the controllers are finely crafted.

One feature that I was specifically excited about, is the Media Connect option. With Windows XP Professional, you can share a music and picture library with the 360. The interface for the music function sorts everything shared by artist, album, or genre. It is very much like iTunes. It will read playlists anywhere in the shared folders. All this is performed when the folder structure is first shared on the PC. The Media Connect service does seem to eat up a good deal of resources on the shared machine, however. With Windows Media Center Edition 2005, you can stream video to the 360 as well.

Finally, I was pleased to find that the 360 supported digital via a fiber cable that piggybacks off of the main A/V connector. The 360 comes with a component cable, but since my surround system currently uses S-Video, I bought a $15 S-Video 360 cable. It also contained the fiber jack. It was nice to finally hear true surround sound. Games like Oblivion and Need For Speed really came alive with fully positional sound for greater immersion.

We didn't test the DVD playback much since we have a nice DVD player, however support of 720p resolution ought to satisfy most DVD fans. The 360 does not support DVD-Audio or Super Audio CD, but I wasn't concerned with this.