Reading Web Comics on the Xbox 360 is Good but Not Perfect

Yesterday I tried to adapt my method of reading web comics on a PSP to read web comics on my Xbox 360. If you want step by step instructions on how to read a web comic archive on the Xbox 360 just follow my tutorial for the PSP but put the final folder of files on an external storage device like and iPod or thumbdrive or stream the photos to the Xbox via a PC

It worked out OK but I found a few things that might make regular reading of web comics on the Xbox 360 a bit of a pain.

When you open up an image in the picture viewer on the 360 the image is scaled full screen and there is no way to zoom in and pan around the image. I am using my LCD TV at 1024x784 mode using a VGA cable and some comics came across fine but the text in vertical formatted comics can be blurry and you can't zoom in and correct it. I love using my iPod with my 360 and I have custom song collections for each game I play ( Such as the play list "Songs to kill zombies with blunt objects to" ) and an iPod is perfect for making massive amounts of web comics available to the 360 but the inability to zoom in and pan and image is a real pain. You can rotate the image but there is no zooming. Damn.

Another real pain in reading webcomics on the Xbox 360 is that the images come up with a thumbnail and there is no way to just display the name. If you have a couple hundred images in a folder and you want to start playing the 300th image if can be a bit slow having to scroll through all the images while the storage device tries to open up each image to produce the thumbnail. You can keep the arrow pressed down and the files will scroll past without a thumbnail but an option to turn off the thumbnails in the file browser would be sweet.

The Xbox 360 can only read JPEG files so your comics that are in GIF or PNG format will need to be batch converted into JPEGs.

Files on the external USB device in this case the iPod can only be viewed over the USB connection and can't be copied to the hard drive. So if you want to read your stash of Penny Arcade, Overcompensating, or Diesel Sweeties on your 360 you have to keep all your files on your iPod or stream them from a PC. I could get the software to stream pictures from my Mac to my 360 but I don't have an network cable long enough and I don't want to have to shell out a hundred bucks for the Xbox 360 Wifi adapter so the iPod method works just fine for me. If you have one of those phenomenally huge thumb drives than that would be a good option.

The ones that were formatted correctly looked great and it was awesome to be able to listen to music off the iPod while reading comics on the 360.

Ultimately I think it would be sweet to have an media RSS reader built into the Xbox so we could read web comics directly from the console over a live internet connection without having to download, sort and batch convert comics in order to get them in a proper format.

I am going to forward this article to some folks out at Microsoft and see if they will consider adding this features in a future update to the 360 software. Major Nelson and Xbox Team I am pointing at you.