Using cleverness to get better performance than your competitor is an edge; using cleverness to get the same performance in the common case but worse performance in the worst case is poor design.

I suspect that HDMI passthrough will be a frustratingly unfulfilled promise, as it is with Google TV.

Recent GPUs are virtualizeable (using multiple command queues); this is mostly targeted for VDI or cloud gaming but unused in PCs. http://www.nvidia.com/object/enterprise-virtualization.html

I don't think it makes sense to compare the Xbox One to Google TV, Google TV is very much a side project for Google which is obvious because they aren't putting much effort behind it. While many people already use their Xbox for streaming Netflix and Hulu, the HDMI passthrough is an extension of that.

I think it makes sense in that the base technology is exactly the same. There is really only so much you can do with HDMI + IR blaster (or for the lucky few with very new TVs and/or set-top boxes) HDMI with CEC.

There are tons of edge cases you run into when you don't have full control of the tuning stack. As one example (I can think of dozens easily):

Family has a single-tuner old school Scientific Atlanta DVR (still very popular with cable operators despite being horribly obsolete). They set it up to record a show, it is currently recording said show, person interacting with the Xbox One does something to change the channel to one different than the one being recorded on... oops! There is no way for the Xbox One to know this is a potentially destructive operation for the DVR. At worst the DVR changes the channel and loses half your show, at best the DVR is smart enough to prompt you about this and stop the channel change, but how does the Xbox One know this occurred? There are some high-end DVRs with APIs that exist in an attempt to deal with situations like this but they are very few, very far between and there are no standards for them.

Corner cases like this present themselves all the time with these HDMI-in/HDMI-out devices like Google TV and they are inherent problems with the current state of set-top box technology. No matter how many resources Microsoft throws at this, the end result will still be kind of lame a lot of the time and a far cry from the seamless experience you see in the on-stage demos.

I agree with you but for discussions sake...

What if this wasn't classified as a corner case? As you said - most MSOs are running either an old Moto or old SA as their standard box. Because headends are either Moto or SA there are actually very few unique STBs in the field. And of those, they are all versions of the same OS that either Moto or SA have been using for a long time.

If MS just threw a bunch of resources at common SA and Moto boxes to enumerate and add special code to handle these cases... could it work? Would it be a better experience? Is it worth it?

Don't they have to decode the HDCP stream anyway? Just getting basic scaling to work would require access to the raw pixel data, right?

Dear god don't compare the Xbox to Google TV. No. Google TV was shit slow at launch and that was enough to kill it, imo.

I don't know if I would consider HDMI passthrough as an ace in the hole... I mean I get how it would be cool to be able to overlay your cable box output on the screen, but this also implies that you would have to have your Xbox on every time you wanted to watch television.

Unless, of course, the pass through works when the device is turned off... However, I haven't heard any mention yet that it does (does anyone know if it will support this?).

And plus, if you had any other multimedia devices (e.g. a Blu-ray player), wouldn't you still need to use the other inputs on the television anyways?

That's the idea. Low power is to help justify leaving it on constantly. You don't ever turn this thing off - it just sleeps at such low power that you write it off like you do with a modern TV or the like.

Microsoft's betting the farm on the idea that a consumer will leave the xbox on 24/7 in a low-power state and have it as THE hub for all things digital entertainment. Your TV goes through it for advanced features such as TV channel guides, extra content, etc. You play games on it. You chat, take video calls and the like on it via Skype. You steam music/movies to it as your media player. All of it is controlled via the Kinect gestures and voice recognition. It is also why they're planning to push updates/etc. through in idle times (e.g.: overnight) when the device is left in low power but able to do basic tasks.

Basically, MS wants to take the beachhead they established with the first two generations and expand it. They want the Xbox One to go against the Apple TV and XBMC media centres and the like to become the all-encompassing portal of your entertainment.

But I don't want Kinect. I don't want to pick up the controller when I want to watch TV. Can I get a good remote for the Xbox One?

Almost surely. There were official remotes for previous generation consoles. It is, after all, a blu-ray player.

> "Developers are going to have a great time this generation thanks to how similar the hardware is (identical in many cases)."

Sure the hardware will be similar, but what use is that if the APIs to access the hardware are totally different? I think the odds of Sony using DirectX in their SDK are pretty slim.

Developers had been writing multi-platform code for 10 years already. When you have API calls isolated from the rest of the code it takes a couple man/months tops to target another API.

The hard part of the previous generations multi-platform had been in getting to the same level of performance. E.g. 360 had a pretty weak CPU and a superior GPU compared to PS3 so the distribution of things done on CPU and GPU was completely different between these two targets.

With completely different abstractions, "similar performance" makes much more sense than "similar hardware". Thanks