Xbox One experience

[Strudo76 7]

Well we got it up and running, but I can't say we were greatly impressed sorry.

 

First hurdle was setting up. Couldn't get the one screen keyboard to display to enter the IP address. Figured out if I changed the cursor mode to browser, then I could get it to pop up, then change the mode back to game. I assume this wouldn't be an issue if using Emby Connect, however we've always been a bit adverse to that option as the internet we have isn't always great, and my impression is that Emby Connect requires an internet connection to operate.

 

After that was taken care of the interface displayed. That was no problem, although we were disappointed with how slow it was loading images. Slowness was a common theme throughout the experience really, and really dissuaded us from going further. Image loading, scrolling and starting media all seemed to take a relatively long time. The computer he is using for the server is pretty slow, and I expected the first run through some screen to take longer due to caching, but it didn't really improve after multiple views of the same assets. But we were there to check out, which is what we did.

 

All the media we tried started playing for the one minute demo play time. (I did have one time where the prompt displayed with two green buttons (one indicating only one minute would play, the other about becoming premier). Pressing the d-pad to the side removed the highlight from both button, probably something that shouldn't happen.) The one minute playback was reasonable, however could I suggest making it automatically play one minute starting from say 50% of the length of the media. The one minute at the beginning of a movie barely (if ever) got past the studio branding screen. Not really a great representation of the picture or audio quality that could be expected, since nothing really happens there. There were a couple of times where there was interruption in playback, but I put that down to the slow server PC. The other thing he was keen to try was seeking during playback, as he says he sometimes tries to seek in media and mostly it just doesn't work. That was also hard to check in the one minute demo, but to be expected. Another hurdle with the one minute limit occurred when we picked something to try that had a resume position. We thought it might play one minute from the resume position, however, it just paused for a while and dumped us back to the media title view. Perhaps if using the one minute demo option, media should always play from the beginning (or alternate location if you follow my previous point) even if there is a resume target point.

 

I figured there might be some interesting options in the settings, so I moved up to the settings button and clicked. We were presented with a home screen with four icons displayed. The first icon (a house) was green, the rest including the cog icon were white. I pressed the right d-pad button, which I assumed was going to move the green highlight to the cog icon. What actually happened was the green highlight disappeared, and the background interface selection was moving around. That's when things got really bad, as there was now no way to return the interface. I couldn't control or remove the icon overlay, as everything I did only affected the faded out media interface in the background. We tried multiple times to attempt this with no success. Once I had to actually turn off the TV to regain control of the Edge app.

 

I'm not really an XBox person, and my mate doesn't know all the ins and outs. Perhaps our inexperience with the XBox One was to blame, however I wouldn't expect these sort of situations to arise for someone with enough knowledge to be able to start the interface, and navigate the XBox One game interface. Certainly more mucking about than I would expect, and too many times we ended up stuck because the interface wasn't doing what we would expected. One of the requirements for him using it is that his 6 year old son would also be able to use it, and getting stuck places would make things incredibly difficult.

 

As it turned out, all was not lost. Usually he uses the Samsung app, and on checking found he had version 0.545, currently available is 2.1.3 or something. That app has improved greatly since the version he had, so he's pretty happy sticking with that for now. As an aside, the problem with seeking during playback he was experiencing was probably due to the media being transcoded. The current Samsung app actually displays whether it is direct playing or transcoding, and there was no problem seeking during direct play.

 

Hope this is useful feedback and doesn't sound like bashing. I was expecting a more straight forward and hassle free experience.

 

@erb, if you're not part of the development team, could you move this to somewhere they'll look to see it, or point them here, or just mention it, or whatever, please.

 

Regards

 

Simon