A Bunch of Updates and Improvements Coming to Xbox One Today

Seen on Major Nel­son’s (Lar­ry Hryb of Xbox) Twit­ter, Microsoft announced a ton of new updates have been added to the Xbox One. These include an intu­itive guide, updat­ed home screen, and Beam streaming.
 

Updat­ed Home Screen

Changes were made to sim­pli­fy the UI and increase over­all sys­tem per­for­mance. There will now be small­er icons for the games, with options for the com­mu­ni­ty, the abil­i­ty to inter­act with your Club, to find Look­ing for Group Posts, view­ing your Achieve­ments and more. If you don’t have a back­ground set, the new Home will spot­light the game you are cur­rent­ly play­ing by fea­tur­ing hero art as your background.

Intu­itive Guide

Press the Xbox but­ton on your con­troller, just once, to pull up the enhanced guide as an over­lay on the left of your screen. The first page of the guide brings up what you use most, includ­ing your Games and Apps, Home, Store, your recent­ly launched appli­ca­tions, the lat­est Games and Deals with Gold for Xbox Live Gold mem­bers, and your top Pins. If you have music play­ing from mul­ti­ple apps, you can con­trol it straight from the Guide, allow­ing you to play, pause, rewind, fast for­ward, and man­age vol­ume con­trols. Last­ly, you’ll be able to take screen­shots and record video with the press of a button. 

Mul­ti­task­ing

With the new Guide in mind, Xbox has added a new Achieve­ment track­er that is acti­vat­ed based on the cur­rent game you are play­ing, and allows you to select and fol­low sev­er­al Achieve­ments. Cor­tana will also appear as an over­lay, so you can set reminders, alarms, access Par­ty con­trols, and play music.

Beam on Xbox One 

You can now stream your Xbox One game­play right from your Xbox One. You can also man­age your Beam broad­casts and chat with your fel­low gamers on chat over­lays that appear on your screen from the Guide. No added soft­ware is nec­es­sary, Beam is built into your Xbox One. You’ll find the Beam view­ing app in My Games and Apps, which lets you watch, chat, and inter­act with your favorite game stream­ers in near real-time. Check out the Beam arti­cle to learn more.

Enabling Xbox One Accessibility

A new fea­ture has been added called Copi­lot. This allows two con­trollers to act as one, ben­e­fit­ing peo­ple who are play­ing with anoth­er per­son, more fun for fam­i­lies by adding coop­er­a­tive con­trols for any game, and eas­i­er for play­ers who need unique con­fig­u­ra­tions to play. Enhance­ments have been made to Mag­ni­fi­er and Nar­ra­tor, as well as more options for audio out­put and cus­tom rum­ble set­tings for your con­troller. This was only pre­vi­ous­ly reserved for the Xbox Elite Wire­less Con­trollers. You can find these options in Set­tings > Ease of Access.

Screen Time Limits

A fam­i­ly timer fea­ture has also been added to Xbox One as screen time lim­its. Par­ents can now set dai­ly time allowances and lim­its for each child — the Xbox One will pick those lim­its up and enforce them when­ev­er the child is signed in. This is sim­i­lar to the Win­dows 10 screen time lim­its. To set this up, head to microsoft.com/family, sign in with your par­ent account, and select “Screen time” for your child’s account. You’ll be able to turn on and set Xbox One and PC screen time lim­its sep­a­rate­ly for each child.

Blu-ray Play­er Bit­stream Passthrough

The Xbox One’s Blu-ray play­er now sup­ports bit­stream passthrough, which allows your receiv­er to decode audio native­ly. All bit­stream for­mats will be sup­port­ed includ­ing the new­er ones like Dol­by Atmos and DTS:X. This fea­ture will not be avail­able until next week. 

If you are play­ing on a PC, there is a Win­dows 10 update as well, which you can check out here.