Gamers can experience a new Media Player and other updated features

Aug 15, 2014 07:43 GMT  ·  By

The team in charge of the Xbox One home console at Microsoft announce that the system update for September of the device is at the moment live for all those who are members of the Preview program.

The announcement on the Xbox Wire states that the Party app has been re-organized in order to allow users to see the activities of those who are part of one and what gamers they are playing.

Microsoft states, "You can also more quickly perform common actions like muting, joining, or sending game invites. Also, Parties now have a Party Leader. This person can change whether the party requires invitations, and she/he can remove others from the party."

The new Friends section of the Xbox One is now available to a larger group of gamers, allowing them to quickly stay in contact with their peers, see what games they are playing and how their Gamerscore has been evolving over the last 30 days.

The new features are not yet ready for prime time and the company says that more participants will get access to it for testing purposes in the coming months.

As promised Microsoft is also launching a new Media Player app which should make the device a true multimedia playback machine.

The team adds, "The preview version of the Media Player app will initially only support USB devices, with DLNA support coming soon. Xbox One will support more formats than Xbox 360, including support for dozens of new file formats like mpeg 2 TS, animated gifs and mkv which will be added by the end of the year."

Gamers will also be able to stream content to the SmartGlass device that they own and to boot the Xbox One directly to a television program, while learning more about what is on via the Live TV Miniguide.

A range of changes have also been made to SmartGlass and console users can now also delete multiple GameDVR clips at the same time while also save the Avatar picture to the One Drive.

A new bandwidth usage display allows gamer to see their consumption for those markets where ISps have a cap.

The Xbox One has once again lost the sales fight with the PlayStation 4 for the month of July in the United States and it will be interesting to see whether the system update coming in September will have any impact on the numbers posted by the device.