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…and you should definitely bring your raincoat.  Fall Dashboard Update Time!

The major functionality of being able to play MPEG-4 Part 2 files with Advanced Simple Profile (Divx & Xvid for your pirate-y types out there) is HUGE for most of us techie folks, and will no doubt require Sony to respond in kind with their Divx update.  (2.02, anyone?)

I went through the list of hundreds of improvements and fixes to pull out some gems that I’m particularly looking forward to.  There are certainly some other appreciated touches in there (as tygerfyr so eloquently put it, "Why are we not more excited about ‘Added localization support for AM / PM in 12-hour clock format for Traditional and Simplified Chinese’?"), but these are the ones that I am most impressed with, broken down by categories:

Functional Enhancements

• Added support to pause background downloads when streaming full screen videos or ads
• Added support to send game invite to Messenger Contact from Xbox 360 (VERY interesting…now I’m assuming Live Messenger will be integrated into games???)
• Added support to show all available Media Sharing Servers on the local network and allow automatic re-affiliation
• Added support for listing multiple computer sources in Xbox Guide music sources
• Changed UI Flow for Media connectivity: default to console, and allow users to change device via X button.  Also remember last chosen device

Usability Enhancements

• Nudges from messenger now translated into rumble notifications on controller during game/movie playback (kinda…)
• Added support for Right Shoulder button on controller to chapter skip forward
• Added support for Right Trigger button on controller to fast forward
• Added support for Left Shoulder button on controller to chapter skip backward
• Added support for Left Trigger button on controller to rewind
• Added Shortcut keys from Remote Control: Pressing Play on a Video/Song/Picture will immediately start playback of that item from the list (pressing Start from gamepad does the same thing)

Spit ‘n Polish

• Added fade in transition for start of video playback
• Added fade out transition when powering down console
• Removed 2nd notification when connection to LIVE and signed into Messenger
• Improve support for "Play Now" calculations with ISP that boost download for the first 20MB of a file
• Added full screen buffering animation for streaming videos from Xbox LIVE
• Improved handling of music playback over games (if music source terminates or has errors, background music returns to game background)
• Added support for displaying Marketplace video previews in Full Screen mode (newly added files are encoded at higher bitrate, existing previews remain encoded at low bitrate)

Here’s the link to the full list.  What are some of your favorite features?