Thurrott Daily: August 16

Tech tidbits from around the web.

8/16/2016 5:15:23 PM

Groove gets another nice update for Windows Insiders

I’ve been championing Microsoft’s renewed interest in Groove on Windows 10 lately, and if you’re in the Insider program, you’ve got another nice update waiting. Microsoft explains:

Another update for Groove Music hit the Windows Insider Fast ring last night for PC, phone, and HoloLens.

Here’s what’s included in this update:

• Playlists from Your Groove and Explore now get tracked in the recent plays section.
• We updated the app so that it warns you when you’re about to add duplicate content to your playlists.
• If you have a Groove Music Pass, Cortana will now play music by genre even if your collection doesn’t have any music in that genre. Cortana, play ROCK! Cortana will also do a better job when you simply tell her to play music. She’ll play music even if you have zero music in your collection. She’ll pull from Top Music in that case.
• We added a bit more telemetry to the Cortana integration with Groove Music so that we can even better understand when she doesn’t deliver on your requests related to music.
• We updated the app so that it automatically enters full screen mode on the console.
• We updated the Feedback Hub app so that it collects even better information about your collection when you submit feedback about the app.
• We updated the way the app looks for music on SD cards so that discovery is more reliable.
• We made changes to improve local playback…we heard your feedback on issues here.

So lots of stuff.

Gears of War gets a gorgeous 4K trailer

Microsoft explains why you may want to play Gears of War 4 on a PC.

“We’re excited to give fans their first opportunity to play Gears of War 4 on Windows 10 PC. Gears of War 4 is powered by a completely new rendering engine, with the Windows 10 version supporting comprehensive video settings, increased texture resolutions, dynamic resolution support up to 4K and more.

In addition, we’ve also announced the minimum, recommended and ideal specs for playing Gears of War 4 on Windows 10 PC.

Annoyingly, they’ve done that in picture form. Here it is.

The Lumia 650 is on sale too

It looks like the Lumia 950 and 950 XL aren’t the only current Microsoft smartphones available on fire-sale. Neowin reports:

The Lumia 650 is now available from the Microsoft Store with 25% off its usual price, reducing it by $50 to $149, until August 21.

You can find it here. I mean, don’t.

HDHomeRun DVR app is available now on Xbox One

I received the following via email:

We have been working with Microsoft and the XBox team to get the HDHomeRun app to XBox One. The HDHomeRun app was published a short while ago and will be available through the app store on the XBox in the next 24 hours.

Both the XBox One Media Remote and the game controller are supported.

So I checked it out. To be clear, the Xbox One app is not a DVR app, it’s just a client. So you still need a PC with DVR hardware somewhere on your home network. Still, probably a decent option for former Media Center users.

More info here.