XBox 360 HD-DVD Player vs Planet Earth HD (1 Viewer)

[RDA]

Yesterday I was so excited about the possibility to see for the first time the BBC HD extravaganza called Planet Earth. Especially after so many wonderful reviews out there. Unfortunately none of the 4 discs are playing on my XBox 360 HD-DVD player. The only thing that I had a chance to see was the BBC opening logo. After this the player stop running and it does respond to any command given through the remote control. I am complete frustrated. It seems that now I am really facing what many people are saying/complain about this player. It is really a bad piece of deal. I am so mad to be an early adopter and finance this new technology. Furthermore to have carried the HD-DVD flag and have been complete “against” Blue-Ray technology. Everything was acting accordingly until few weeks ago. I started notice that subtitles were not working on the following titles: Babel, Children of Men, and Payback. By that time I send an e-mail to Xbox and the answer was pathetic: “…the composite cable is not firmly connected… the television is not tuned to the correct input selection…” (Service Request Number 10325305 _ _). So I decided to contact Xbox Customer Service by phone to see what they could be doing for me and I’ve just got this “…this is a new technology and it is most probably a software defect…” Last night I contacted them again and they asked me to send the player to a repair center (Service Request Number 10342090_ _). I know already what is going to happen in my case. NOTHING AT ALL!!! Let me explain why I am feeling this way:
1) I will pay a courier to send my player to the designated repair location;
2) The repair center should have a couple of discs that they use in order to check the players;
3) It doesn’t mean that those titles (that they have) are one of the above (do you thing a Planet Earth copy will be around?);
4) They will hook my player up with a TV set and put a disc to play;
5) If I got a problem on 4 of my titles (out of 26) it means that I have just 15% of chance to have the player showing any problem on the subtitle issue because they will not be able to check Planet Earth by themselves. I guess my odds are really low – close to zero.
6) Finally (after 2 weeks), my player will be mailed back to me without any repair done.
7) I will get it back and put it on the garbage; or sell it for $50. Nonetheless it cost me just $199.

I won’t stop buying HD Discs but certainly no more HD-DVD and Xbox flags to be carried out. Welcome PS3 and Blue-Ray. I am really looking forward to Samsung duo combo, BR-Java, PS3 80Gb, etc.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

If you had done a simple Google search you would have seen that your Xbox is missing an update needed to play this and several other newer HD-DVD discs. If you're using XBox Live you can login and then insert the disc and you'll be prompted to download the update. Or you can download the necessary files from this site and burn them to a DVD which will apply the update when you insert it in your Xbox.

Surely this makes more sense than screaming "The sky is falling!" and abandoning Xbox and HD-DVD in favor of Blu Ray because one realese won't play. These are new technologies and new standards and there are going to be bumps along the way. (In the early days of DVD there were many discs that would not play in various makes and models of players, trust me.)

Regards,

Joe

 

[RAF]

For the record, I just tried my HD-DVD Planet Earth set in my XBox 360 HD-DVD drive and it worked just fine. I keep current with all firmware and software updates via XBox Live so I can vouch for Joseph's advice to make sure you have the latest updates for this device. If yours doesn't work it's not because of any flaw in the HD-DVD 360 design, but probably something wrong with your particular unit (assuming you have the current update from MS).

 

[ppltd]

I will second that. The newest HD DVD update also cleared up problems I had with the Discovery disks. MS has been pretty good getting these updates out.