XBox HD-DVD Drive won't play some HD-DVD movies

[akrako1]

http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/news/show/552

'Children of Men' HD DVD Hits Xbox 360 Playback Snag?
Thu Mar 29, 2007 at 04:10 PM ET
Tags: Technical Glitches, Xbox 360, Microsoft, Universal (all tags)

We've received numerous reader reports that Universal's new 'Children of Men' HD DVD is a bit of lemon for some Xbox 360 owners, due to incompatibility problems with the console's HD DVD add-on drive.

'Children of Men' hit stores earlier this week on March 27, as one of the most highly-anticipated HD DVD releases on the format thus far, and as our Kenneth Brown wrote in his recent review of the disc, it apparently boasts stellar video and audio. Unfortunately, more than a few Xbox 360 owners have had issues playing it on the device's popular HD DVD add-on drive, with many of our readers writing in to say that the disc simply won't play, and that even multiple returns of the disc have produced the same issue.

When testing the disc out on our own Xbox 360 add-on HD DVD drive, we had the same results -- the disc spins in the tray, but is seemingly unrecognized by the system. A black screen and a reboot threw us back to the Microsoft Dashboard menu regardless of how many times we continued to try and load the film. We tried this dic on another Xbox 360 and found the same problem. Strangely, that tryout was even more unsuccessful -- we didn't even make it to a black screen, it simply spun the disc longer than usual and remained at the Dashboard menu.

We should note that since word of these issues first emerged, readers have also written in to say that the disc plays back fine on their Xbox 360 devices, while others have reported playback problems with the disc on Toshiba's XA2 player (we had no such issues on our XA2).

We've contacted both Microsoft and Universal, but have not yet received any official word on whether it is a hardware problem, a software problem, or both.

We'll certainly keep you posted as soon as official word comes in. In the meantime, we've set up a dedicated thread in our Forums area to discuss playback problems with 'Children of Men' on the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive:
http://forums.highdefdigest.com/showthread.php?t=5337

Stay tuned...

[jg0001]

As an owner of an HD-DVD addon, I read thru some of that thread. The problem is, almost no one mentions how old eitehr their 360 is nor their addon, nor do many of them mention if they have XBOX Live hooked up to get updates. I do have mine plugged into LIVE and have yet to have any problems with any HD-DVDs. The one issue I do have with my setup (both base and addon bought when each item debuted, respectively), is that the fan/spin noise is almost unbearable at times -- esp versus my oh so quiet PS3 when playing BluRay.

*on another note, I'm just shocked more than 10 people even want to buy that movie at all*

[pfycjl]

spam

[shelbyGT]

According to Amir over at avsforum.com, the problem is not the players but a bad production run by Universal (or whoever made the movie). I like this movie a lot, actually, and am happy that my hd-dvd disc plays just fine in my 360 add-on.