I purchased all four of the Discovery Atlas HD DVDs today. It had no problems recognizing and playing the data on the Brazil and China disks, but it did not do anything except display a black screen when I inserted the documentaries on Australia and Italy. I was wondering if anybody else has had this problem. My guess is that the two disks that did not play have some HD codec that the player cannot recognize at the moment.

Is anyone that interacts within this forum close to the Microsoft HD DVD team or know of someone that is involved with it, and can they ask them the reason why these two disks do not play?

I also found another forum where someone else has had the same problems with these two disks.

:mad:

I don't think it'd be an issue with the HD-DVD player per se as the HD-DVD player is a great unit, and it has a good number of features.

You should post this in the HD-DVD hardware forum, where you might actually get some help. I don't own an Xbox add-on so I can't help you.

I've played many HD DVDs on my XBOX 360 add-on (including watching Fearless tonight). Never had any type of issue.... SJ

I found a couple of things in the forums that might be why the Australian and Italy HD DVD disks are not playing in the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on. One is that the Italy and Australia both have stop-resume capability, like a SD DVD, but they're HD-DVD! The other is that Italy and Australia HD DVDs have been authored in "basic" mode rather than "advanced mode". I don’t know the difference between basic and advanced mode, but this seems to be the problem as to why these two disks are not playing in the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive. Like I said before, I didn’t have problems with the China and Brazil disks (advanced mode) playing on the drive.

Australia and Italy WILL NOT play on xbox 360 and Microsoft is aware of that. I've contacted Microsoft and they told me they cannot give me a data on the fix, IF any. So, I'm returning those titles right now.