So I updated my xbox this afternoon with the new firmware and it really is impressive. The animations, sounds and overall feel is very similar to the Nintendo Wii, and while the customizable avatars are a blatant ripoff, they’re still pretty cool.

One of the features that I was most looking forward to is the Netflix integration. I use to have netflix a couple of years ago and when i realized i was barely watching any of the movies, canceled it. But now that you can stream the movies directly off of your xbox through the new interface, i decided to sign up for a free trial again.

The least expensive monthly service package is $8.99, which let’s you rent a single physical dvd at a time and unlimited streaming time (the trial is free for 2 weeks). The first thing that I was happy to confirm is that you can watch HD over component cables (there’s copy protection over the hdmi, and often that means they don’t allow you to use the content over the unsecure component). Unfortunately though, their HD selection sucks. There wasn’t a single movie in there that I wanted to watch, even though the quality of the few i tried out did look pretty good. The SD selection is much better, although still lacking and the quality is about the same as a upscaled dvd, although a bit softer looking. I’m not sure if i’m going to use the service or not, we’ll see how the next 2 weeks go.