Problem with Advanced Content on DVD+RW on Xbox360 addon

evdberg

I have a very weird problem. I am writing a HD-DVD authoring product, and own a 1st gen Toshiba HD-A1, which I use as main test unit. The result of my product runs perfect fine on it, and also on a friends HD-XE1 (the European XA2). Yesterday I took my HD-DVD addon to a friend who just bought a Xbox 360. We tried a few of my disks, but they do not work at all. We just get a black screen, no error message, nothing. Also the buttons on the controller don't do anything. Only when we eject the disk, the main menu reappears.
Currently I do not use scripting yet, but I did chose Advanced Content because I want to in future versions. Now the disks simply contain a DISCID.DAT and VPLST000.XPL in the ADV_OBJ folder and a EVO, MAP and HVA00001.VTI in the HVDVD_TS folder.

Is there anyone who has a clue what might be the problem From other threads on this forum I understand that the Xbox should play Advanced Content from recordable/rewritables, so what is wrong Thanks in advance for any help.

Peter Torr - MSFT

Does your friend have an Xbox Live connection (You don't need to pay for the "Gold" service; the free "Silver" is all you need). This is because the Xbox will need to download the latest HD DVD player software.

evdberg

Yes, he specially had connected the internet connection to upgrade the software to the latest version. We checked the version, and it is V2.0 (also because we could turn on/off the DRC and output the sound as DTS).

What also would help is to have a small sample disk with a few seconds of video that should play on the Xbox. Then we have a working example to start with and compare to our disks to see what is different.

Andy Pennell MSFT

Try the same content on a DVD-R disc, to determine if it is a content problem, or a shiny disc problem. Personally I have only ever used DVD-Rs on Xbox.

evdberg

We also tried a +R DL with booktype changed to -ROM and it also did not work. Those disks read perfectly fine when the add-on is connected to a PC.

Why would you use -R to test Why not -RW Also if possible, can you (or somebody else) try with a +RW (I have no -R at the moment).

evdberg

Yesterday evening we tried again to make it work. We tried everything we could think of, even used samples from Peters blog, but nothing worked. Each time we only got the black screen and not even any error message.

I would really appreciate it if someone could provide a working ISO of a disk that works on the Xbox360, just with a few seconds of video.

Clinic

It seems quite odd that your layout will work on the addon connected to computer...

What are you using to write your playlist and other files

How are you editing your DISCID.dat

How are you burning the disc

What have you used to encode your video

These questions might be unnecessary, but I have recently played a successful burn with DVD-R in an updated XBOX HD addon connected to the XBOX Using Nero 7.3 with the settings found in this forum at the lowest burn speed. If I can get some free time, I'll cook up a playable disc layout...

evdberg

All files are written/created by my program, and verified extensively. The finished product will also burn, but that part is not included yet, so for testing we use Toast or Nero. We burned the disks in UDF 2.5 format.

For testing we use existing compliant video and audio streams, we did not encode anything ourselves. For authoring the user should provide compliant video and audio files, encoding will not be part the software.

The drive can read back the disks perfectly fine, so that can not be the problem. It looks like that the Xbox does recognize the disk (since no error message is shown), but just does not start playing. The drive is spinning down after the disk is mounted.

I would appreciate it if you could find the time to cook up a (small) playable disc. Thanks!

evdberg

I already found the problem ... there seems to be a bug in the Xbox HD-DVD player. I made a workaround for it and now my content plays 100% perfect.

Andy Pennell MSFT

Please provide details of the bug and which version of the Xbox player you are using (its on the Help screen).

evdberg

We had upgraded the Xbox software to the latest version before testing (V2.0).
I also notified Amir M and John Green of my findings.

It seems that the Xbox player wants the entries in the VTI file ordered by index number, so entry 1 must have index 1 and so on. But in my disks the index was usually not the same as the entry number. All other players correctly look up the entry with the given index number, but it looks like the Xbox player just assumes the entry number equals the index number and select the wrong or even a non existing entry.

Andy Pennell MSFT

Thanks, I'll ping John to get the details.

FYI all Xbox players are 2.0.x. The latest is 2.0.4629.

evdberg

That's the one we have ... but I doubt it makes a difference, this 'behavior' is most likely not changed.

By the way, I always give new revisions of my software a different version number, that makes it easier to refer to a specific release ...