40 Days #3: Treat game videos like real videos

Over the course of past dashboard updates Microsoft has made it much easier to work with the video section on the media blade of the dashboard. It used be a long and arduous process just to get into and out of that area, but that has since been simplified, and you can even quickly filter your videos by type now.

The dashboard seems to think there are two types of videos. First, the "real" videos like movies and TV shows. When you look at their listings in your collection, you see descriptions, nice half-screen cover art, and the length of the particular piece of content. So far so good, and this is consistent with how a normal person would want to work with videos.

The red-headed step child of the real videos is what is called the game video. You find these under the games section of the Marketplace, along with other non-video content (themes, gamerpics, downloadable content, etc.) that belongs to a particular title. The location and bundling of these videos with the rest of the game items makes sense. What doesn't, however, is that the dashboard treats them just like those other pieces of content.

In the video library area, those videos do not have the nice large cover art. Instead, the dashboard takes the small icon graphic for the game and stretches it into the large box reserved for cover art. This results in a pretty jarring effect, and the fuzzy pixelated images look pretty horrific on an HDTV. To make matters worse, the nice little details like description metadata are missing, and there is no time information about the length of the clip. Instead you get a super useful file size figure (which makes sense for something like a downloaded map pack, but not for a video), which you can then try to convert into a time estimate based on the quality level of the clip.

The Marketplace folks really need to come up with some way to tag these items as actual videos, with correct metadata and appropriate cover art. Otherwise it remains as one of the areas of the dashboard that looks very unpolished, especially for owners of high-def TVs, who are supposed to be primary consumers of a lot of this content to begin with.

As a side note, I had to lift the above image from Engadget after a long and fruitless search that yielded no better screenshots of what I wanted to talk about. Is there no site out there that has a complete collection of updated dashboard screenshots, screen by screen, blade by blade?