The Xbox 360's hard drive is often a point of discontent for both gamers and developers alike. A recent rumor that a 60 GB SKU is coming finally has industry analyst Michael Pachter toss in his two cents, saying that the 20GB hard drive "is no longer sufficient." Check out the full article for the rest of the story.

    

We haven't heard much about Microsoft Xbox 360's IPTV option these days, but a handful of revealing screenshots show that IPTV may be installed in Xbox 360 consoles soon... very soon, in fact.

For those who still aren't aware about Microsoft's upcoming IPTV service, it's basically an Xbox 360 application that delivers broadcast-quality video on demand, and offers services more commonly found on VOD subscriptions, such as DVR and picture-in-picture view, among others.

So what happened with the IPTV plan, and what's taking it so long? We don't know, but the tipster pictures sent to Xbox360 Fanboy may be an indication that the project is well underway. Aaron sent his Xbox console for repairs, and when he got it back he found a new option in the Dashboard. The option has gibberish for a name, but has a telling TV icon to the left.

Not satisfied with that clue? Check out the subsections under the new category. There are options pertaining to live TV functions (such as pausing), on-demand movies, and chat while watching TV. All options do sound like IPTV functions. None of them work when selected, however, and only leads to an error message.

Certainly an exciting (and intriguing) rumor, and we can't wait to see if the above screenshots are truly legit and if we're going to see the service take off in the near future.

During last week's CES, we picked up on news of Microsoft's IPTV for the Xbox 360. Chris Satchell had made several statements on this upcoming tech, and detailed how it would be applied to the Xbox 360.

Now, for the rest of us still wondering what IPTV does when it gets plugged into our console, we've got news. The Microsoft TV site has just opened up a section on their site dealing with IPTV, and provides an explanation of what it does:

Microsoft TV IPTV Edition is an integrated and comprehensive software platform developed specifically to deliver broadcast-quality video and new, integrated TV services over broadband networks. The platform combines market-leading features such as instant channel change (ICC) and multiple picture-in-picture (PIP) with traditional TV services such as broadcast programming, VOD, and DVR. The software is developed to integrate seamlessly and economically with other IP-based communications and media services for PCs, phones, and other consumer devices. Microsoft TV IPTV Edition is ideal for telecommunications carriers and for cable operators looking to deliver differentiated TV services and experiences.

The site also makes detailed explanations of other features like Video-on-Demand and the previously announced digital video recording feature making it to the 360 package. Given that the tech isn't slated to hit the 360 until later this year, this provides a good opportunity to catch up on the features we may want to use once it's released. Full details on the read link.

Encode360 is a video encoder and compression utility that allows you to convert video's to Xbox360 and Zune compatible WMV format. This application has recently had an overhaul and as a result now uses a new video engine. In the past, the widely used FFMPEG encoder engine was used which has now been swapped out with MediaInfo.

Dan, the author, was kind enough to give us some of their his change in video encoding engines. "FFMpeg really was just a stop-gap until something better turned up, and I’m glad to say MediaInfo is doing an impressive job on discovering the details of nearly every file format I throw at it. However, there’s no telling what new problems might be introduced as a result. I haven’t had any, but someone else might. I’ll tackle issues as they arise. Just remember, this is a beta."

Fixes

• Arithmetic error in timerPercentComplete_Tick would occur if WME couldn’t determine the source duration
• Default settings for 802.11b in an unconfigured environment were too high
• Numerous cosmetic and logging bugs

Click "Full Article" for the full list of changes including new additions and change log.

Download: [ Encode360 2.0b5 ]
Download: [ MediaInfo 0.7.4.3 Win Gui ]