• Transformers (available in SD and HD)
• Goodbye Bafana (available in SD and HD)
• Intersection (available in SD)
• Primal Fear (available in SD)
• Clear and Present Danger (available in SD)
• Naked Gun 2 & 1/2: The Smell of Fear (available in SD)
• Naked Gun 33 & 1/3 (available in SD)
• Top Secret! (available in SD)
• Bug (available in SD)
• Hardball (available in SD)
• The Phantom (available in SD)
• Orange County (available in SD)
• 1408 (available in SD and HD)
• Disturbia (available in SD and HD)
• Hot Rod (available in SD and HD)
• A Mighty Heart (available in SD and HD)
• Heartbreak Kid (available in SD and HD)
• Stardust (available in SD and HD)
• In to the Wild (available in SD and HD)

Not only that, Warner Bros will be adding to the catalogue too with:

• The Assassination of Jesse James (Warner Bros, available in SD and HD)
• Beowulf (Warner Bros, available in SD and HD)
• License to Wed (Warner Bros, available in SD and HD)
• No Reservations (Warner Bros, available in SD and HD)
• The December Boys (Warner Bros, available in SD and HD)
• Nancy Drew (Warner Bros, available in SD and HD)

Standard definition will cost you £3.23, while the hi-def versions will set you back £4.56.

Since my not-so-great initial experience with Video Marketplace, I’ve used it several times without any problems – my only frustration had been with the slow pace of updates to the catalogue, so this news is most welcome! Who needs to be stuck in the middle of a “phoney phormat war” between the HD-DVD Jets and the Blu-Ray Sharks, anyway? (Via: CrunchGear.)

I figured it was a bandwidth/performance scaling problem caused by an exceptionally high demand over the Christmas holiday period, until this, seemingly unrelated story, with the headline “XBL accounts pwn3d, Microsoft does nothing”, caught my eye…

..and that got me wondering if perhaps they’d implemented a number of internal fixes to address the issue and inadvertently screwed something else up in the process – after all, most of the problems with XBL appeared to be account-related; logging on, account creation, account recovery, etc.

I’m speculating here, of course, but one thing is certain – if there was a security hole in Xbox Live that allowed accounts to be hijacked, Microsoft will have done something about it, even if they don’t (or can’t) admit it.

If this is true, I’m afraid that new “feature” on its own isn’t going to cause much excitement.

I use my Xbox 360 as a media centre – streaming video, photos and music to it – just as much as I use it as a games console, and there are times when the noise of the console itself drowns out quieter pieces of movie dialogue. I had been thinking about getting at least one other Xbox 360, say, for the bedroom , but the thought of it howling away in the corner while Mrs T is trying to sleep means that idea won’t get off the ground.

No – what Bill needs to show us is an Xbox 360 that runs near-silent, like the PS3.

For that one feature alone, I would replace my existing Xbox 360 and buy another for the bedroom the moment it was released.

So, please Bill, get on stage, fire up that new Xbox and say “Listen to this….”

Here’s how it works; you download a movie of your choice for cost somewhere between £2 (for a standard def movie) and £3.20 (for a high def movie). After downloading, you have 14 days in which to watch your movie before it expires gets deleted; as soon as you start to play the movie, you have 24 hours to finish watching it before it expires.

The initial movie offerings are a bit hit-and-miss (thanks to Engadget for the list), but on Friday evening I opted for The Fugitive, in standard def. The movie was listed as 1.8gb download, so I was a little surprised to see the download confirmation message appear after only a couple of minutes.

Knowing that the movie expires 24 hours after you hit play, I didn’t do anything with it until Saturday evening, when Mrs T and I curled up on the sofa for a little Oscar-winning action. I hit play and got the following screen:

This confirmed my suspicion that there was no way a 1.8gb file could been sucked down that quickly. I hit Play anyway, thinking that if the Xbox knows it’s only got a partial download and I’ve just hit play, it would go out and download the rest of the movie in the background. Not so; about 40 minutes into the film, we got kicked back out to the video blade.

The section of the movie we were able to watch was pretty good – there was a bit of pixelation at the start, but after that it was fullscreen DVD quality with 5.1 surround – and that was streamed to the Xbox over my wireless LAN, too.

I went back into Video Marketplace and tried to download the movie again, but then got this screen:

Well, I thought, at least I’m not going to be charged twice! I tried again several times during the evening with no joy, and didn’t have any more success on Sunday either. I  ended up taking a quick look on Xbox.com to find that there were indeed some technical issues with Video Marketplace. The problem for me was that my 24 hour countdown was now running:

Strangely, when I tried to play the section I’d already downloaded, I was unable to – and this was well within the 24 hour window:

So, today I called Microsoft and after spending only a couple of minutes in a queue, got through to an operator. I explained what had happened and read back the error codes I’d seen, and within 5 minutes had the 250 points refunded back to my account (after going through the now-obligatory security questions).

Despite the problem I had, the service deserves at least a second chance, so I will be using Video Marketplace again. Perhaps a way for Microsoft to improve the customer experience is to not deduct the points until the movie has fully downloaded, so that if glitches with the download do happen, the customer isn’t the one having to chase for a refund.

As far as the UK is concerned, this a new service offering so there are bound to be a few hiccoughs early on, but if you’ve used Video Marketplace too, I’d be interested to hear what your experiences have been like.

http://www.xbox360defective.com/index.php

He is one of a growing number of angry gamers frustrated at the way Microsoft are ignoring the scale of the problem. If the comments over at the xbox.com forums are anything to go by, Microsoft’s attitude to their paying customers will do more for sales of the Wii and the PS3 than any ad campaign:

• http://forums.xbox.com/8347347/ShowPost.aspx
• http://forums.xbox.com/8527831/ShowPost.aspx
• http://forums.xbox.com/8220655/ShowPost.aspx
• http://forums.xbox.com/8524389/ShowPost.aspx
• http://forums.xbox.com/8744140/ShowPost.aspx
• http://forums.xbox.com/8767317/ShowPost.aspx
• http://forums.xbox.com/8767792/ShowPost.aspx

I really hope that, behind the scenes, Microsoft are frantically working on a fix because the longer they try to ignore this, the more damage they’ll do to the good reputation that XBox360 was building.

[tags]customer service, dashboard, update, bricked, console, defective, Xbox360, Live, red, lights, ring of light[/tags]

Reading through the forums on xbox.com, I’m not the only one who has had their console bricked by this update, either. A similar thread on Major Nelson’s blog was seeing some lively activity on the subject too, before comments were closed. If you’re in the same position, don’t you find that what’s adding to the frustration is the lack of any kind of response from Microsoft? This started being reported a week ago.…!

Putting this right is going to cause Microsoft a nightmare before Christmas, because the update appears to prevent the wireless adapter from starting, making an “over the air” fix unlikely. This leaves customers with having to ship their consoles off for repair, so we’re going to be Xbox-less over Christmas! If I was running the Xbox team, I’d be pushing my people to provide a fix that users can download to a USB thumb drive and run themselves.

Xbox has been building a great community at Xbox Live, and like most social networks, it grows by word-of-mouth; only a couple of weeks ago I was telling a friend how great my Xbox 360 is; how it’s not just a games console but a media centre too; how much fun Xbox Live is. After I told him about the update-from-hell, and mentioned that I’ll probably have to get a replacement, he said, “I think I’ll wait for the Wii instead…..”

And that’s the biggest risk for Microsoft – pissed-off people will talk more often and more loudly than happy people. If Microsoft don’t start talking to their customers soon, the lack of communication will kill Xbox Live more efficiently than the faulty update.

As for me, I’ll be gazing at a copy of “Gears of War” on Christmas morning, wondering when I’m going to get to play it.

[tags]marketplace, live, games, console, update, 1080p, dashboard, bricked, bricking, repair, replace, replacement[/tags]