During Microsoft's Gamescom press conference, the company announced a slew of new features making their way to the Xbox One through an upcoming system update. Among the most significant (especially for anyone who embraced media capabilities on last generation consoles) was the inclusion of a 'Media Player' app that will allow users to playback content on local storage (USB drives) as well as over their home networks through DLNA. Among the list is support for "enthusiast" codecs such Divx, Xvid, and MKV. Its seems clear that Microsoft not only wants to make the Xbox One the place to play, but also the place to watch all of your pirated legitimately obtained video content.
Just last weekend I was quickly reminded about the lack of functionality on both new consoles when I was trying to playback local media in my living room. It's a relief to know that at least one of my current gen consoles is taking steps in the right direction. Your move Sony.
Check out a video tour of the upcoming media player app as well as the full list of supported codecs heading to the Xbox One below:
Xbox One compatible file types:
3gp audio
3gp video
3gp2
aac
adts
animated gif
asf
avi divx
avi dv
avi uncompressed
avi xvid
bmp
jpg
gif
h264 avchd
mjpeg
mkv
mov
mp3
mpeg 1 ps
mpeg 2
mpeg 2 hd
mpeg 2 ts
mpeg 4 h264 aac
mpeg 4 sp
png
tiff
wav
wma
wma lossless
wma pro
wma voice
wmv
wmv hd