What Went Wrong With The 360 Dashboard?

Last month's Digital Foundry article on the shortcomings of the Xbox 360's new, so-called "Metro" dashboard highlighted a bug that saw video playback washed out, emphasising compression artifacts and lowering image quality compared to the previous, perfectly serviceable video player. We also revealed that Microsoft appeared to be ignoring the feedback of its beta testers to the point of deleting reports of the issue, causing dismay from those who put their time and effort into road-testing the new update.For reasons we'll go into later, media is primed to be a new battleground for games consoles going forward and it's no mistake that "Metro" pushes video playback as a key element. The rise of Netflix in the US has helped to define games consoles as a convenient means to stream from a massive catalogue of TV shows and movies offered by a growing range of suppliers. Support (of sorts) for the Bing search engine and YouTube also illustrates how the future focuses on accessing the internet via the TV. In effect "Metro" is positioning the Xbox 360 as a competitor against the next generation of Smart TVs we can expect to see appear this year, and, via its new Video Marketplace apps, as a one-stop shop for video content on demand.It is a shame that such an important update for Microsoft should prove to have some very serious issues - problems that go beyond the previously reported washed-out video. It's safe to say that our initial blog caused quite a reaction, not least from other beta testers who asked us to investigate a range of issues, such as borked colour levels in gameplay and the removal of 1080p playback from the dashboard. The good news is that - as far as we have been able to discern - gameplay is unaffected by the new update, despite many reports to the contrary. We ran the Modern Warfare 3 brightness calibration tool on 360 consoles running dashboards old and new and found that the RGB levels were essentially identical when running on the same settings.Unfortunately, reports that the dashboard video player's 1080p mode has been nerfed appear to be on the money. Video calibration tools put together by the AVSForumdemonstrate conclusively that, while the Xbox 360 has no problem whatsoever decoding 1080p video, it is no longer being rendered in native resolution. To illustrate the issues, here we see the same full HD video being run on an older NXE dash at 1080p, and the new Metro offering at both 720p and 1080p. As you can see when clicking on the thumbnails, just about all the detail is being resolved on the older front end, but the Metro dash's 720p and 1080p images are effectively identical in terms of core resolution.

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