Inside Xbox 360: An interview with Jeff Henshaw

Paul Thurrott got the chance to visit Microsoft's campus and interview Jeff Henshaw, the Executive Producer for Xbox Digital Entertainment. The first part of the interview, which you can find here, takes a look deep inside Xbox 360 while the second part focuses on the Xbox 360 Dashboard, the Marketplace, the new Xbox Live and the media experiences user will enjoy with the Xbox 360.

Here are some highlights:

Speaking on PlayStation 3 capability to deliver two 1080p signals: The total number of 1080p-capable TVs on the planet today is ... zero. There are none. Sony has got a dual ... I want to make sure I say this right, because it's science fiction. They had dual HDMI outputs off the back of the console. And I think that there's some theory that you could take dual 1080i signals and interlace them together to have a progressively rendered scene.

But again, there are no TVs that actually support this. I think most people are going to actually take one of the HDMI outputs and just feed it out at 1080i.


The new Dashboard: This has all of the features from the Guide, plus some of the stuff from the Xbox 1 Dashboard, plus a whole bunch of brand new Xbox 360 stuff as well. For some of the experiences, we actually want to leave the game altogether and go to what we call the Xbox Dashboard. You've seen an earlier version of the Dashboard on Xbox 1; it's that green wire frame thing, the kind of spooky looking thing. We have completely redone that for Xbox 360. Unlike Xbox 1, where you have to get up and eject the disc to get into the Dashboard, which is a pain, anytime you have the Xbox Guide up in Xbox 360 you can now press X and it will take you out of the game and drop you right into the Xbox 360 Dashboard. And you can get right back into the game, if you want, without having to get up once again and reinsert the disc. You can even power up and down the console with your wireless controller.


On the new Guide: It overlays right on top of the game. What that means is that these Invitations and the Xbox Guide are available any time, in any game, or any other Xbox 360 experience. The game will usually pause, if it's a single player game. In this case [the demo version of Crimson Skies] the game is still running, but most games will pause. With online multiplayer games, we'll let the other people continue to go at it. But it's up to the game [developer] to decide what it does here.


The Message Center: It's very similar to email, but there are a few key differences. If you've used email, this is going to be very familiar. It gives you a list of messages just like your email Inbox, but this isn't connected [directly] to the Internet. This is part of the Xbox Live service. So all of those messages are going to be gaming-specific or entertainment-specific messages from trusted people that you've given the OK to. I can also get an invite to chat, have an audio chat with someone. But with Xbox 360, people that have a camera can also send video messages to anyone, whether [the recipient] has a camera or not. And then they can play those video messages back.


The Media Blade: The Media Blade is the place you can go to experience connected digital entertainment experiences without any of that hard core competitive stuff. Obviously, we've got great support for music and photos here. Music can be ripped directly from a CD to the Xbox 360, but that's actually not the optimal scenario. The optimal scenario is when you've already got your library of music ripped to your PC. Or, you're a digital photographer and you've already got a photo library built up on your PC.