News on the Autumn 360 dashboard update is out. I’m well chuffed to see that they’re including support for streaming video from any PC running Windows Media Connect or similar (WMP11 or Zune Software). This was a much requested feature and true to their word Microsoft are actually listening to the users.

The Autumn update also includes a new high def mode, the illustrious 1080p which Sony will have you think is the holy grail of HD. In reality it’s nothing to write home about until console hardware is significantly more powerful, enough at least to output at 1080p and still 4x anti-alias like the 360 currently does at 720p.

Elsewhere there are a bunch of UI enhancements, most notably in the Live Arcade though from the screenies I saw over at Xbox.com it looks like the UI team may have departed slightly from the iconic interface. Will be a shame if they have but I’ll take a look tmrw and post back here with first impressions.

Update: Well, I powered up the 360 this morning at about 10:30am, no prompt to get the dash update but starting a game seemed to force a check and the update downloaded and installed.

First thing I headed off to check was the new Live Arcade menu area, there are some great improvements here in terms of functionality but it’s painful to see that the UI standards adhered to elsewhere in the dashboard have been thrown to one side. I wonder what the original interface design team from AKQA think about it?

Video streaming from my Windows XP box works a treat though videos have to be plain vanilla Windows Media Video (WMV) to show up in the 360 media blade. Thankfully it’s an easy (albeit lengthy) task to take any DivX encoded AVI’s and convert them to WMVs using Windows Movie Maker (or whatever it’s called).

Update: Actually, although it’s easy, the results are piss poor. Instead I suggest you take a look at the rather brilliant write up on Joystiq.com RE Transcoding & streaming videos on Xbox 360. Not only is it considerably faster than using Windows Movie Maker, but the results are infiniteley better too! :)