Having trouble playing video since the latest XBox360 system upgrade? I was - and was convinced it was a bug with TVersity and transcoding. I was going to try bootcamping my old MacbookPro just so I could try WMP11 (my current Windows machine is Server 2003, hence the TVersity) when I decided to give Connect360 one more shot. Unfortunately, I got the same result with every video that I had tried under TVersity as well. I was told I didn't have the necessary software even though I had downloaded the media update many months ago.

On a whim I went to the support site for Connect360 where I ran across this tip:

I've installed the NXE Update and now my videos won't play!

Microsoft has released the long-awaited New Xbox Experience update for the Xbox 360. We have verified that Connect360 is fully compatible with the new update. The only known possible hiccup is video playback: In order to play back your videos using the updated firmware you will need to reinstall the Media Update available on Xbox Live.

So I just re-downloaded the media playback support and guess what? Everything works. I haven't tried TVersity again (the machine is powered down) but I'm sure it will be fine now as well.

I'm pretty surprised by this. I know the percentage of XBox360 users streaming video over their network is probably a minority, but you would imagine something like this would have been caught in QA.

As a quick side note, I'm not so enamored of the new UI. It's a bit too cutesy and I find some menu items a bit oddly placed (especially DVD playback). However - the "Install to Hard Drive" is priceless. I would have paid for that by itself. The speed boost isn't a heck of a lot, maybe 15-20%, but it adds up, and best of all - games play incredibly quiet now. I don't get the 'loud as a 747' fan during games.