Console-Based Video Playback: Strange Days Indeed*
I’ve just successfully (I think) concluded a bit of weekend tech-detective work, although the outcome wasn’t what I’d prefer. Back in June of 2005, I cyber-penned a writeup in which I suggested that the then-embryonic blue laser optical disc struggle might represent an unnecessary format revolution. Instead, an evolutionary alternative approach pairing conventional red laser DVDs with advanced video codecs such as H.264 (aka MPEG-4 AVC, aka MPEG-4 Part 10) and VC-1 (aka Windows Media Video) might adequately service market needs for many years to come, especially if the red laser optical discs were extended beyond two layers’ worth of storage capacity.
As such, I’ve kept an eye out for developments in the high-def-on-red-laser arena, such as the frequently-mentioned-by-me HD VMD format from New Medium Enterprises and the seemingly dead Forward Versatile Disc. Microsoft has also partnered in the past with studios such as Artisan, HDNet and IMAX to supply the marketplace with WMV-encoded red laser DVDs containing high-def video. Ironically, however, most/all of these discs were Xbox 360 playback-incompatible, from a double-whammy standpoint:
- They contained autorun and other files that were explicitly Windows-cognizant, and
- The content was DRM-soaked in a manner that the console couldn’t comprehend from an authorization standpoint
However, here’s a little-known fact; HDNet’s material wasn’t DRM-strapped. So it was that last night, as I poked around the house looking for something to watch, I came across the WMV-encoded two-disc set of HDNet-owned Magnolia Studios’ documentary The Smartest Guys In The Room. I popped the disc into the Xbox 360’s DVD drive and, after navigating to the ‘videos’ subdirectory, selected the WMV file and hit ‘play’. All was well, at first…that is, until I punched the fast-forward button.
Although I was able to visually scroll through the material at high speed, as expected, any attempt to return to normal playback resulted in a blank screen and no audio. The chapter-skip function (which lets you index through the content at 11 minute, 11 second time intervals) also gave me blank screens. I even (unsuccessfully) tried streaming the content off a LAN-connected PC to the Xbox 360. If I stuck a shortcut to the PC optical drive-housed file (or, for that matter, its directory) in the ‘My Videos’ folder underneath ‘My Documents’, the console couldn’t find the content. And if I manually copied the WMV file to the PC’s hard drive and then tried streaming it from there, I ended up with the exact same blank-screen behavior as when I’d earlier attempted local playback of the mixed-format DVD directly from the console’s optical drive.
On a hunch, after remembering that a recent-past PlayStation 3 firmware update had added support for non-DRM’d VC-1 video, I attempted disc playback via the PS3. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Sony’s console handled the content just fine, from both real-time and fast-forward (at up to 120x speed) standpoints, and both direct-from-disc and LAN-streamed from a PC via UPnP…that is, until the 50 minute, 46 second mark, when I consistently received an obscure ‘This content cannot be played (80028801)’ error message. So close, but yet so far, as they say…
I suspect I know what’s happening. If you divide 50 minutes and 46 seconds into the content’s full playback duration of 1 hour, 51 minutes and 49 seconds, you end up with a ~45% completion failure point. Multiply the content’s 4,633,797,676-byte file size by 0.45 and you end up with 2 GBytes…not coincidentally (I suspect) the maximum FAT16 volume size (can you tell I’ve run into this problem before, with other clips and file systems?). The PS3’s file system and video playback engine are, I’d wager a guess, choking on files larger than this threshold. As, perhaps, is the Xbox 360’s software, since I was able to play other, albeit shorter, WMV-encoded HDNet material in the past, though I don’t remember if I explicitly tried navigating around in it and I don’t have it in-hand at the moment in order to re-attempt the experiment.
Granted, neither console perfectly handles my long-duration, high-def clip. But who would have expected that Sony’s hardware would do a better job than that of gear designed by the same company that developed the codec?
AN commented:
