Have a tip or suggestion? Be sure to drop it in the comments so others can use it too! Enjoy your new Xbox.
TV and A/V Power Options
If you want to let your Xbox turn on your TV when you turn on the Xbox, there’s a setting for that. There’s a way for it to turn off your TV too. Head over the settings, then under the “General” menu select Power mode & startup. You can change other power settings here of course, but we’re looking for another menu within this set of options.
While in the Power Mode menu, scroll down one and select TV & A/V power options.
Select HDMI-CEC and you’ll permit your Xbox Series X or Series S to interact with the power options of your TV. You will need to restart your console after enabling this.
Digital Assistant Voice Commands
If you’re already miss saying “Xbox, on” to turn on the Xbox with a Kinect, you can still make that happen with the help of a digital assistant. You can issue other commands too.
In the Settings, scroll down to the fourth menu called Devices & connections. Then you’ll see an option for Digital assistants.
If you choose to enable the digital assistants, you’ll have to continue your setup through the respective digital assistant apps. The settings menu shows options for Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa.
Here are some of the commands you can try with the Google Assistant:
- Hey Google, play [game name] on Xbox
- Hey Google, turn on/off Xbox
- Hey Google, pause/resume on Xbox
- Hey Google, mute Xbox
- Hey Google, record that on Xbox
- Hey Google, take a screenshot on Xbox
If your Xbox device name is not “Xbox” then you’ll need to say the device name in the place of “Xbox” for these commands.
And some commands you can use with the Xbox Skill on Alexa:
- Alexa, tell Xbox to turn on/off
- Alexa, tell Xbox to pause/resume
- Alexa, tell Xbox to turn volume up/down
- Alexa, tell Xbox to launch [game name]
- Alexa, tell Xbox to launch [media app name]
- Alexa, ask Xbox what I can say
Customize Your Home Menu
While on the Home screen, hit the “View” button (the two windows button) to customize it. It’ll take you to a Customize Home menu that allows you to reorder anything already on the screen, or delete them altogether. If you choose to add something, you can add apps based on suggestions, games, groups, and even specific friends.
But that’s not all you should change in this menu! As you can see on the right, you can change your system theme and adjust how motions work on the Home screen (the description specifically says “make motions more fluid while exploring home).
As of launch, there are three themes: Dark (the system default), Light (it’s as bright as you’d expect!), and Scheduled, which allows your system to alternate between the two based on the sunrise and sunset times or on the time you set.
Back at the Customize Home menu, you can select My color & background to change some defaults, including Tile transparency. You can also set your background to achievement art, gar art, colors, custom images, screenshots, or allow the Dynamic background to play. The Dynamic background looks like this and has a soft motion.
The color is determined by the color you choose in the personalization settings.
If you’re in need of high contrast, you can also find find that in the Ease of Access settings through the Customize Home menu. There are additional Ease of Access options in the Settings too.
Change Your Guide
When you press the Xbox button on your controller, it pulls up what’s called the Guide. The order of information it presents to you can be changed. To do this quickly, open the Guide menu by pressing the Xbox button and move over to your profile icon to access the Profile & system menu.
Select Customize the guide in this menu to bring up the customization screen. Unlike the Home menu, you can’t delete tabs, but you can move them to any order you like.
If you share a lot of screenshots, consider moving the Capture & share menu second. Or, if you play with friends frequently, the People tab might be better at the front of our Guide.
Capture and Share Settings
The Xbox defaults to the following capture settings (though this could be different if you transferred your Xbox One settings):
- Allow game captures: Captures by me or games
- Record what happened: 45 seconds
- Automatically upload: Captures by me
- Game clip resolution: 1080p SDR
- Capture location: Internal
To change these, open the Settings. Then, move down to Preferences, the fifth option in the list. Then select Capture & share.
Customize all your capture settings here, including make your “Record what happened” settings as short as the past 15 seconds or as long as a minute with the 1080p setting. This changes if you bump up the resolution to 4K. Clips of that resolution can only be captured at a max of 30 seconds and will be posted at a lower resolution on Xbox Live.
4K screenshots can be displayed at full resolution, though. According to the guide, 4K clip preparation take “about a minute per clip.”
Assign Your Controller
If you plan on sharing your Xbox with several people and if you have your own controller, you might want to consider assigning that controller to your profile. This makes it so that whenever that specific controller is connected to the Xbox, it’ll sign into your profile.
You can do this in a few places, but one of the fastest is in the Settings menu. Open Settings then go to the Account menu. Then open Sign-in, security & passkey. From here you can choose to change “This controller signs in” option, but make sure you’re using the controller you want to link.
Check Your Display Settings
Before you hop into a new game, double check that your TV settings to ensure your games will look their best. In the Settings’ General menu, select TV & display options. This menu should look familiar if you changed your display options on the Xbox One X.
These should be automatically calibrated, but it is worth checking just in case. If your games aren’t looking as they should, check out the 4K TV details page. If your screen looks like this, you might have a problem:
Remember, you need to use an HDMI 2.1 cable and a device compatible with HDMI 2.1 for 4K UHD 120hz.
You can customize additional video settings in this menu too. If you don’t want 4K UHD for some reason, you can change that here along with selecting specific video modes: