mcc

andi

@mcc

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@mcc

It turns out the XBox "Series" is broken for streaming in the worst possible way

So I have been learning the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night speedrun on Christine's XBox Series X and I was gonna stream it this weekend. On Playstation streaming direct from the console was incredibly easy so I expected it would be simple on XBox also.

It is not. So: I tell it to start streaming. It does everything on screen to show it has started streaming. When I bring up the stream on Twitch, it's… a silent loop of… a "corporate Memphis" animation of an astronaut and an angel and a cat clock.¹ It is supposed to be Castlevania Symphony of the Night. Certain system menus, if I bring them up while this is happening, force the stream to automatically "pause" and once it pauses it does not (can not) unpause, the streaming UI is just locked up. I can click "Unpause stream" and it bleeps and animates like I selected the menu item but the menu option continues to show "Unpause stream" afterward and the stream remains "paused". Of course, I'm not sure what difference this makes since it streams the same cat clock animation regardless of whether it's "paused" or "unpaused". In any of these situations, my headphone sound is not included.

This is really hard to chase down because how do you even search for that? "Stream is a cat clock." What I eventually find is a five year old Reddit thread where it turns out you simply can't stream Symphony of the Night. More specifically the XBox does not let you stream ANYTHING unless the developer has set a special "ok to stream" flag, and none of the XBox 360 backward compatibility titles have the flag set at all. So that's really disappointing, but beyond that, why not show some kind of error message in that case? Why… just stream something totally other?

Not sure if I'm going to be able to make my stream tomorrow work or not. :/

¹ A friend tells me he recognizes this as one of the animations from Microsoft's "Mixer" service?!

EDIT: Story continues

mcc
@mcc

It gets worse

So searching for a fix I find an interesting suggestion: Mirror your game screen to a PC using the XBox app, then stream that using OBS. What I have learned is that the XBox app(s) are very broken. A chronicle of software depravity follows.

So, I log in on the "Xbox Console Companion" app on my Windows 10 PC. It easily lets me connect to the Series X, and shows it is playing "Castlevania: SOTN". (This is the name of Symphony of the Night on the XBox. "SOTN". If you search for "Symphony of the Night" on the XBox store you won't find anything.) Beneath the name of the game is a red circle. I want to dwell on this because it was very weird. It wasn't clearly a button or anything. It wasn't animated. It was just a red circle. If I clicked the red circle, it sort of… throbbed. I could click it as many times I wanted and all it would do is jiggle a little.

Uncertain what this means, I try the "Test Streaming" button. This gives me an error dialog explaining that either my XBox or my Console Companion app needs to be upgraded. After a moment of fiddling and a search on Google, I realize what this means is that the XBox Console Companion app is entirely discontinued at this point, and I need to switch to a new app, with a separate Microsoft Store entry, named "XBox". Okay.

I download the new app and log in. The interface is not as good as the Console Companion and much much more focused on aggressively selling you things (selling you PC games actually, an interesting decision for the "XBox" app) but whatever. I tell it to link to the XBox, like the Companion did instantly. When I select the XBox, the only thing it will do is bring up a box saying "Let's test remote play". That sounds like what I want. Clicking "Next" causes a few different boxes to flicker on and off screen, and then… it dumps me at an error box saying only "Try again in a bit. Something went wrong.". This error turns out to be very hard to search for, especially given Microsoft's poor naming choices (every XBox console name seems designed to frustrate Google, app is named "XBox"— "XBox Console Companion" is not a good name but at least it's searchable). But the most common explanation is: This error usually means you have Bluetooth turned off. This is a very interesting comment since my Windows box does not have Bluetooth, and if it did it probably wouldn't be able to reach the XBox which is in another room.

I think I might still be able to pull this out; a friend says he got this error before and got it working by repeatedly turning things on and off again. He also may have wound up using the Android app at some point in the process, which opens the interesting possibility that in order to get our Microsoft console to stream to my Microsoft operating system I will need to use a third product, manufactured by Sony actually, to negotiate between the two.

In the meantime, I am extremely startled by the poor ~user experience~ here. I'm used to Microsoft products working poorly, but what I'd been hearing for years was the XBox was their one line that worked very well. Yet the experience I'm getting here is more akin to a Windows 95 level of glitchiness. Let us count up Microsoft's interface sins:

  • Streaming is failing, yet instead of any user-facing message of such it not only fails silently but decides to stream something else entirely
  • Consumer/set-top device shipping in 2023 can reproducibly get into an interface state where clicking a prominent button simply does nothing at all
  • Dialog box says app may need to be upgraded, where the correct solution is to delete the app and download a different one from the same vendor (I traversed this quickly but a less computer savvy user might not have)
  • Dialog box saying "Try again in a bit" for a permanent error [see edit below].

Guh

EDIT: I have it working now. So get this.

The reason remote play was not working was that remote play was turned off on the XBox.

Now, given, that's a pretty understandable reason for remote play to not work. But I probably would have figured that out quicker if it had given me an error message other than "Try again in a bit".

Also, once I turned on remote play, remote play still did not work. It just gave me a different failure mode where instead of displaying an error message and saying "Try again in a bit", it instead showed me a box saying "Turn on your console and sign in with this account". This box was impossible to escape. Signing in on the console had no effect. The way I eventually got past this box was to change the name of the XBox, then turn it off and leave it off for 60 seconds. After that it worked. I'm not completely certain if changing the name actually did anything.

That sucked.

FINAL EDIT: My suffering had not ended.

I posted the above edit Friday night. Satisfied, I went to bed, thinking I would simply be able to boot up ten minutes before the stream the next day. No.

When I set up the stream exactly as yesterday, the remote play window on the Windows 10 machine was very, very dim, as if a dark curtain were over the game. My stream started half an hour late as I struggled to understand what was happening here. Searching Google, I found many forum, reddit etc posts from people begging for help with this same problem, and unhelpful "restart the XBox" style advice from Microsoft representatives. Eventually, restarting the XBox did seem to fix the problem, and I was able to start my stream, albeit nearly half an hour late.

When my stream completed, I basically swore never again. I wanted to continue my SOTN speedrun attempts, but my rube-goldberg streaming situation was just not worth it. I decided that in future, I would simply use the XBox's built in video recording feature to record my play sessions. Streaming is kinda high-pressure anyway. This would let me run as a casual thing on a random afternoon.

When I came back on the next random afternoon, that Monday, I once again hit a wall.

There were two problems.

  • Unlike the PS4/PS5, which can record a half hour of play without even being told to do so ahead of time, the XBox is limited to videos of four minutes in duration. That is not enough for a speedrun. Looking around, it turns out you can extend this to one hour— not enough for some SOTN categories, but enough for the ones I'm running— with a USB3.0 external hard drive. Fine. I plug in a USB stick. It is not accepted because the USB stick is FAT32 formatted and it can only record to an NTFS drive. Fine. I plug in my backup hard drive with an NTFS partition. It is still not accepted because despite being created by an actual operating system company, apparently the XBox Series is not able to comprehend drives with multiple partitions. I sigh, order a new USB stick off Scamazon¹ so I can format it NTFS, and go back to my loathed "Remote Play"/OBS solution.

  • As with the start of my stream, once again I am in dark curtain land. Infuriated, I spend my precious spare time I was going to spend playing a fun video game debugging this and re-reading the many internet chronicles of other people hitting this bug, until by complete coincidence I figure out a solution: It turns out that the reason the dark curtain appears sometimes but not other times is that the dark curtain appears anytime that you initiate a remote play session while a game is already open. If the XBox has the system "Home" menu open when remote play connects everything is fine, if Symphony of the Night is open the dark curtain remains until you disconnect Remote Play, bring up the "Home" menu, and reconnect. I may have just found the solution to a problem that has tormented countless others over the last five years and I have no way to communicate it to any of them.

I start recording on OBS and hurry to get in one last run in the time I have left. I am killed in the inverted castle by a bat.

¹ Take that, Jeff Bezos.

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in reply to @mcc's post:

modulusshift
@modulusshift

I get constantly notified on my PS5 that various cutscenes are not available for streaming, even though, to my knowledge, I am not streaming, I have never set up streaming, etc. But yeah, doing this is a new one on me rofl

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Video-Game-King
@Video-Game-King

The error message thing is symptomatic of UX design philosophy from at least 2008, when UX designers, in designing error screens, wanted to move away from Windows 95-style blue screens, which they felt users had been interpreting as unfriendly and too technically daunting. The problem with this is twofold: not only do the new error messages fail to convey the level of useful information that Windows 95 error screens provided (there were error codes to look up), but the language that designers have replaced it with reminds users too much of customer service speak that only pretends to be friendly and helpful more for the sake of the speaker than the person they're speaking with. In other words, it's just as unfriendly as what it replaced; just in a different direction.

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Cania
@Cania

god mixer was so good for 9 months, it was the best streaming service, then microsoft bought it and ate it all up and made it pointless.

it had nearly latency free streaming! built in interaction with viewers, like putting buttons directly on their screens! a healthy community! everything i want from streaming!

anyway this just reminded me that mixer was good and now it's microsoft

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mcc
@mcc

MS actually shut Mixer down after buying it :( In like July 2020. It was really abrupt and seemed to be in direct response to a single scandal where someone went public about racism on the Mixer team. Instead of trying to fix the corporate culture they just shut down the entire product within days of the negative press appearing.

They transferred all the Mixer partners of the time to, of all places, Facebook Gaming.

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in reply to @mcc's post:

NotMiki
@NotMiki

This is dispiriting but after my multi-day adventure Trying To Get Windows 10 To Recognize An Analog Headset I can't say I'm surprised. I take it you don't have a capture card? I tried screen mirroring with a PS4 a while back to get around Sony muting audio for certain games and got it working but the stream quality was ultimately too degraded to make it worth it.

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NotMiki
@NotMiki

PS4's internal streaming works great when it works but blocks certain content automatically (certain cut scenes designated by the developer, automatic muting of copyrighted music in rhythm games)

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modulusshift
@modulusshift

so, I don't believe the Xbox has Bluetooth either, the only reason I can think the Xbox app would want Bluetooth is to talk to a controller (which actually communicates to the Xbox over WiFi normally, but has a Bluetooth mode for connecting to PCs). So maybe you'd bypass that by plugging an Xbox controller in?

Also, yeah the Series X has been fairly buggy, but it's still generally better than actual Windows. and I'm blaming the state of the Xbox app on Windows, personally. it's a lot more than the old console companion app, it's also the source of the Xbox Game Bar which has utilities for when you're gaming on PC.

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modulusshift
@modulusshift

Yes. It may want a controller connected to establish the remote play connection. Since that's theoretically why someone would want remote play, even though it's not how you're using it.

I think you should be able to get away with not using a controller after setting this up the first time, though? But I haven't done this on PC since the Console Companion was discontinued, I usually remote play from my phone, which will happily spoof a controller on the touch screen if you don't connect one.

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knutaf
@knutaf

I don't have a great idea of what the problem is, but it doesn't require a controller plugged into the PC (just tried it). I've done it in the past with a controller plugged into the console but remote streamed to a nearby PC. Can't remember why I did something so goofy. Must have been a reason at the time.

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knutaf
@knutaf

Really sucks that you ran into trouble here. Full disclosure, I work for Xbox, though not in the parts where you hit issues. Can't really argue with almost anything you said. One thing though is that while you're right it's a developer preference about games being permitted for streaming, it's not a blanket disallow for Xbox 360 backcompat games. I have streamed Geometry Wars 2 a lot in the past and just tried again successfully.

I also tried to stream SOTN just now. It pops a little toast at the top of the stream that says "this game isn't allowed for live streaming", but the toast disappears in like 5 seconds, and there's no further indication in the UI that the game isn't being streamed. I filed a bug about those UI issues just now.

The Xbox app on my PC that also lacks bluetooth worked fine just now, but without a better error message (grr us) it would take time to figure out what went wrong. Bluetooth feels like a red herring, but there are enough weird/dumb things that it might not be. My guess is "something something network". Rebooting and/or making sure you're on the same subnet are probably the best ideas I have for fixing it.

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mcc
@mcc

Thanks for the help. I am pretty sure I would have immediately noticed a toast such as you describe but I started and stopped my stream several times and saw no such toast.

Re 360 games, so I guess a more accurate statement of the problem is 360 games default to no-streaming and the developer must opt streaming in, but Konami's videogame division now consists of a broom closet and one intern who is paid to not answer the phone? :/

Christine's using the TV so I can't really test your suggestions right now, but in the meantime if user feedback is helpful—

  • When I first launched the XBox app there was a little dropdown with a list of XBoxes on the network, between my Microsoft account and the notifications bell. Since then the XBox appears to have gone to sleep and the dropdown went away. Aside from the fact it seems strange I can only connect Windows to Xbox for remote play if the TV is on (I tried holding down the button to wake up the XBox, and it made a sound, but this did not cause the Xboxes dropdown to appear on the Windows XBox app; you'd think "spouse is using the TV for something else, so I'll boot remote play on my PC" would be the primary use case for remote play): It would be helpful if the Xboxes list were always present, as it is in the old Console Companion app, even if it was only to show the previously-interacted-with XBox and list it as disconnected. Aside from the current setup reflecting strange business practices (the XBox app has five permanent tabs related to PC games, but zero permanent tabs related to our XBox) it would be friendlier UX, if something is to go wrong as it has currently, for me to know for a fact "if an XBox were connected, it would be listed here, therefore the XBox must be having connectivity issues" instead of worrying there's a pane somewhere I haven't yet located.
  • The XBox app has a mysterious button titled "Show queue". In it, it shows that "Microsoft Solitaire Collection" has been installed. I hadn't consented to this being installed, so I tried clicking "Manage" in the queue view and then "Uninstall Game". This did not result in uninstalling the game. In fact I tested this several times and from changing timestamps and notifications which appeared during the experiment, I believe what is actually happening is that it was successfully uninstalling the game but that uninstalling "Microsoft Software Collection" causes the XBox app to immediately initiate a process which re-downloads and re-installs Microsoft Solitaire Collection. (Although the repeated uninstalls do seem to have removed[?] Microsoft Solitaire Collection from the "My Library" tab in the XBox app; not sure if this is a bug.) Aside from this being, as before, dubious business practices, if there is some reason Microsoft cannot allow "Microsoft Solitaire Collection" to be uninstalled, it would be better UX if it would display a dialog box or simply gray out the "uninstall" button rather than exposing an uninstall button which effectively does nothing.
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knutaf
@knutaf

The opt-in nature for 360 games makes sense, but I'd take it a step further and guess that it's opt-in for all games. Just that for more recent games, it's probably part of a questionnaire during the onboarding process for the platform. Seems like nobody was able to secure permissions for some of these older games from before the streaming feature existed. Sucks.

I think a number of the things you hit are actually bugs and not intended. Bugs suck, but there's at least a chance they can get fixed.

  • The "game not allowed" toast not showing is a bug. I wish I could repro that so I could capture a bug report and route it to someone.
  • The consoles list dropdown not showing up sounds like a bug too. I always see it, even when my consoles are off.
  • I'm able to repro the Solitaire Collection uninstall weirdness. I'll get a bug filed for that.

Thank you for taking the time to write detailed feedback even in the presence of a lot of frustration. I can't make any assurances about what will get fixed or when, but I can at least route the feedback to someone to look at.

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mcc
@mcc

The "game not allowed" toast not showing is a bug. I wish I could repro that so I could capture a bug report and route it to someone.

I can take video. Does that help lol

The consoles list dropdown not showing up sounds like a bug too. I always see it, even when my consoles are off.

Maybe this is because on the local installation there has never been a successful XBox pairing.

After turning on the xbox and logging in to my account the box did not appear until I closed and reopened the XBox app.

(Still seeing the 'Try Again in a Bit. Something went wrong' screen. Will try rebooting Windows and XBox and see what happens.)

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knutaf
@knutaf

Thanks for the video offer, but what I really need is OS logs that come with a bug report. I believe you that it's not showing, but only logs will give a good idea of why. :)

I was about to say there's normally a step to "add a console" so the app knows about it, but I can't find that in the PC app. I'll have to ask someone what could be going on here.

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mcc
@mcc

Ok. Well I can get you windows OS logs potentially but our Xbox is not set up for it.

Incidentally, I got a little further. It turns out the Xbox actually had remote play disabled! Which is kind of understandable it did not work but "try again later" is definitely the wrong error message in that case. This is interesting though because it implies the inappropriate error may be reproducible (by attempting to pair Windows 10 Xbox app with a console whose Remote Play is disabled).

With that fixed and the console rebooted, the Xbox app is now instead freezing at a screen that says "Please turn on your Xbox and log in as the displayed account." Before it showed this screen but only for a split second and then it was replaced with the "try again later" screen. However, signing in as the account on the Xbox does not advance the screen in the Xbox app. It is just stuck there.

I am going to try tomorrow calling the tech support line. (Also, it turns out there was some sort of service disruption tonight, so maybe it will just work tomorrow. But probably not.)

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mcc
@mcc

As an update: I have it working now! I don't know if this level of detail is in any way helping, but FYI, these are the steps I used to get past the "please connect your xbox" box which otherwise was deeply persistent and lasted past reboots of both the PC and the XBox:

  1. I changed the name of the console (using the XBox interface). (Some people on Google actually did recommend this.) This did not by itself fix it.

  2. I connected the Android app to the console and was successfully able to Remote Play. This did not fix the problem on the PC either.

  3. I turned the XBox off for 60 seconds then turned it back on again.

  4. I changed the name of the XBox in the Android app (which, curiously, seems to be a different name from the name selected for the XBox in the XBox interface).

… after this… it worked. I do not know if the thing that fixed it was turning the XBox off for 60 seconds, changing the name of the XBox in the Android app, or neither and it was just fully random.

If it were my job to improve this product, what I would probably do is a controlled test where I factory reset an XBox, then turned off Remote Play, then tried to connect the Windows 10 XBox act to Remote Play, then noting what (if any) error message I got, then turning Remote Play on on the XBox and seeing whether inability to connect to Remote Play was in some way "sticky" after the Windows machine has failed to connect once.

Anyway thanks again for the help!

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mcc
@mcc

Hey, I'm sorry to keep bombing you with these posts but :) I have one more little bug report that I think could actually help people if you could somehow get this into the hands of XBox QA.

In my stream on Saturday, and then again when I tried to play recording runs offline on Monday, I discovered an unusual behavior in Remote Play. Sometimes when Remote Play connects the remote play window is covered with a dark curtain. The game can be seen but only very dimly. I never saw this on Friday, hit it on Saturday, it fixed itself on Saturday after a reboot, saw it again on Monday. Searching the Internet, I find many, many people over the last five years have encountered forms of this bug. Checking google for xbox remote play dark screen, dim screen etc finds lots of examples and none of them ever found a solution other than rebooting and sometimes that fixes it.

After experimenting I have found a 100% consistent repro for this bug, I know how to force it to appear or not appear. The trick is if you connect Remote Play when the XBox is at the Home Menu you do not get the dark curtain, if you connect Remote Play when the XBox already has a game up on the screen you get the dark curtain. The dark curtain then stays up until you disconnect and reconnect Remote Play. (Rebooting does not help except by coincidence.) I don't know if this occurs with all games, all XBox 360 games, or exclusively with Symphony of the Night, but I know it does happen 100% of the time with this one game at least and if it does occur with other games it could explain the mystery reports.

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knutaf
@knutaf

Thanks for reporting this. It's a good bug, and I can repro it too. It looks like it may affect all older games (built against the older XDK) and not newer games (built against the newer GDK). I filed a bug for it. I'm still working on routing some of your other pieces of feedback.

Edit: I stumbled upon a simpler workaround, in case it works for you. I was able to hit the Xbox button, go to Home, and then back into the game, and the dim curtain was gone.

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mcc
@mcc

Thanks, that saves some time at least…

I got an external thumbdrive for the XBox so hopefully I can just record videos now and won't need to do the remote play steps in the first place.

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