Across all four generations of the Xbox platform, the user interface of the system software has been called the Xbox Dashboard. While its appearance and detailed functions have varied between console generations, the Dashboard has provided the user the means to start a game from the optical media loaded into the console or off the console's storage, launch audio and video players to play optical media discs, or start special applications for the Xbox such as streaming media services from third parties. The Dashboard also provides a menu of settings and configuration pages for the console that the user can adjust.