One of the not-so-cosmetic changes in the fall update will be the ability to let you play your games directly from the hard disk. The new feature will let users install all of the game content directly onto the hard drive to improve game load times. Microsoft reports that it has seen a 30 percent improvement in load times in internal testing. As an interesting data point, Microsoft went out of its way to tell a group of reporters that the full Devil May Cry 4 hard disk installation took roughly 10 minutes on the Xbox 360. The installation took twice as long when we conducted our own installation tests on the PlayStation 3. Another side benefit of having games installed on the hard disk is reduced noise, since the optical disc no longer needs to spin up. However, you will still need to have the game disc in your optical drive while you're playing it, presumably as a piracy check.

If it ain't broke don't fix it.

We are delighted to announce the general availability of the first release candidate of our 1.0 version. Please note that this is a release candidate and not a final release, meaning that we need your feedback in order to fix issues and turn this into a final release as fast as possible.

We will post full release notes shortly, in the meantime in case you missed it, this release is all about user interface and usability, but it also includes many bug fixes and other minor and major improvements to the transcoding engine, media library, auto discovery by devices, and much more.

In order to simplify some of the initial configuration needed to get TVersity up and running for the first time, we are including in this release a configuration wizard that can do most of these tasks for you. This includes firewall setup, service auto-start setup, Vista setup issues and more.

The codec pack has been updated as well, for best transcoding results it is recommended to install it. Our transcoding engine can now for the first time download FLV and MP4 videos, convert them and stream them to devices all at the same time. We have had this capability for a while with WMV streams but other formats needed to be pre-downloaded - not anymore!