Xbox 360 woes: owners experiencing video problems

A new trend of Xbox 360 malfunction is cropping up, and it looks like it’s going to rival the Ring of Death in terms of the number of people experiencing the same problem. Several Xbox 360 owners posted in the Xbox.com general discussion about a common video failure that they are experiencing – strangely enough – all at the same time.

The screen will be blacked out, they said, with white dots splashed all over the screen. Some posters also reported that they see green shadows – one of the symptoms of video card failure – before the video disappears. The audio remains unaffected.

Then it gets interesting. For some reason, all the people started having the same problem around the same time. Most of them were playing Forza Motorsport 2 before the screen blacked out (a few others were playing Halo 2).

The Xbox 360 users tried to figure out what may be causing the problem. Several placed the blame on faulty cables; some tried switching from High Definition to Standard Definition, but to no avail. A few posters chose to debunk the “blame the cables” theory. One of them was using component HD cables that came with the Premium box when he experienced the video blackout. He tried switching the cables with regular AV but he experienced the same problem.

Others put the blame on the hardware layout inside the Xbox 360 and poor ventilation, which was also what others surmised as the cause of the Red Ring of Death. A few mentioned the possibility of an Xbox Live update glitch, which may explain the reason why these people experienced the black screen around the same time.

Will this be another massive hardware issue that Microsoft has to deal with?

A new trend of Xbox 360 malfunction is cropping up, and it looks like it’s going to rival the Ring of Death in terms of the number of people experiencing the same problem. Several Xbox 360 owners posted in the Xbox.com general discussion about a common video failure that they are experiencing – strangely enough – all at the same time.

The screen will be blacked out, they said, with white dots splashed all over the screen. Some posters also reported that they see green shadows – one of the symptoms of video card failure – before the video disappears. The audio remains unaffected.

Then it gets interesting. For some reason, all the people started having the same problem around the same time. Most of them were playing Forza Motorsport 2 before the screen blacked out (a few others were playing Halo 2).

The Xbox 360 users tried to figure out what may be causing the problem. Several placed the blame on faulty cables; some tried switching from High Definition to Standard Definition, but to no avail. A few posters chose to debunk the “blame the cables” theory. One of them was using component HD cables that came with the Premium box when he experienced the video blackout. He tried switching the cables with regular AV but he experienced the same problem.

Others put the blame on the hardware layout inside the Xbox 360 and poor ventilation, which was also what others surmised as the cause of the Red Ring of Death. A few mentioned the possibility of an Xbox Live update glitch, which may explain the reason why these people experienced the black screen around the same time.

Will this be another massive hardware issue that Microsoft has to deal with?