All I know is I can't wait for Modern Warfare 2
Yes!
Part of the response to Challenge Types 24 and 25 (Response Types 7 and 5) is a rotational angle between 2 sectors on an original disc. The host's CCRT (which abgx360 decrypts) contains the target angles that would occur on a perfectly mastered disc when read by a perfect drive. There is also a value in the CCRT which only occurs for Challenge Types 24 and 25 that appears to specify the maximum deviation for a given angle. Currently all Xbox 360 games have the same angles (1, 91, 181, 271) and maximum deviation (+/-15). This is a copy protection system based on the fact that we cannot control the location of physical sectors on our backups, and our angles would be hugely different compared to an original. This is a fine protection as long as you can trust the drive firmware to make the actual measurement instead of simply replaying a previous response, which is what hacked firmware does. The default setting in abgx360 is to adjust the replay angles (which only hacked firmwares can see and use) that deviate more than 3 degrees back to their CCRT target values because in real world testing on a normal drive, up to 2 degrees of deviation is quite normal and deviation greater than 3 on any game is rare and could be suspicous (although it's very common to have high deviation on a dying or worn out drive). Alternatively, (paranoid scenario) a game could be intentionally mastered with a deviation far from its CCRT target and adjusting it to the target value would also be suspicious... although this would potentially cause problems for disc authentication on legitimate unmodified drives.
If you put an Xbox 360 disc in a normal DVD video player you will see a screen that says, "To play this disc, put it in an Xbox 360 console." This happens because there's a DVD video partition on the disc which is split over both layers on original discs. On normal backups the video partition is all on layer 0, and hacked firmwares are supposed to redirect reads to the layer 1 video back to layer 0. However, it was discovered that some hacked firmware versions prior to the release of iXtreme were not doing this properly, and if the Xbox 360 host tried to read the entire video partition, the second part of it would be blank because the firmware started reading from layer 1 instead of continuing to read from layer 0 like it was supposed to. One solution to this problem was called SplitVid, and it works by appending the layer 1 video to the end of an iso (padded up to the proper position based on PFI) so that when these buggy firmwares start reading from layer 1 they will actually read the layer 1 video instead of blank data. The better solution is to simply upgrade your firmware to the latest iXtreme version because these old firmwares have even more security holes, even if you have a perfectly stealthed disc. iXtreme versions prior to v1.4 also have a bug in disc jitter (see 'Is there such a thing as a "bad kreon rip"?' for more on this). If you still want to add SplitVid (or even if you want to remove it) you can select your preference in the Misc tab. The default behavior is to not check for it and just leave it the way it is, because if you're using iXtreme firmware it doesn't matter if a backup has SplitVid or not; data past the game partition will not be readable by the Xbox 360 host.
Current versions of Kreon's ripping firmware use preset values for the angle responses to Challenge Types 24 and 25 (Response Types 7 and 5) which isn't a problem because currently all Xbox 360 games use the same target angles. Kreon applies a small jitter to the preset angles, and sometimes it will give an angle of 359 degrees for CCRT target angle 1 (deviation of -2). When stored in the SS in LSB format this angle is also known as 6701, and back when the now useless KreonChecker was introduced these angles were thought to be timing values, and a value of 6701 was thought to be radically different from values like 0000 and 0100 observed when ripping the same disc with a Samsung drive. Although original firmwares may use timing to calculate the angle measurement, the difference between 6701 and 0000 is actually only 1 degree and definitely not a huge difference as originally thought. All was not in vain however, since this discussion brought about the realization that iXtreme would improperly jitter 6701 to 6801 (359 to 360), which is completely invalid and not an angle that original firmware will ever return. The proper behavior is to rollover from 359 to 0, which was implemented in iXtreme v1.4 and is a very important security update if you use or plan to use Xbox Live, even if you only play backups ripped with a Samsung drive because it can also return an angle of 359, and for some discs it's actually the most likely measurement. And yes, this means that you can stop using KreonChecker! abgx360 has an option (not enabled by default) under the AutoFix tab that will adjust 359 degree angles to 0 so that older versions of iXtreme will not exhibit this bug, but the best solution is to simply update your firmware to the newest iXtreme release for your drive, and there will be no need to reburn any of your backups.
AnyDVD is an app that runs in the background to remove DVD video protections on the fly. This is a nice feature when playing or ripping protected DVD movies but it causes problems when ripping Xbox 360 games because the video data (and possibly game data) will be altered in a way that is detectable on Xbox Live. Altered video will be easily detected and fixed because abgx360 knows which video partition (and matching PFI) your game should have based on the timestamp of authoring in the SS, and it knows what the CRC of that data should be. However, AnyDVD has also been observed to cause corruption in the game partition. If corruption occurs in an actual file in the game data, it could result in the game crashing or reporting an error when playing that backup. If it occurs in the random padding in between files, the corruption will not affect gameplay but could be detectable on Xbox Live. abgx360 looks for AnyDVD style corruption in the game data whenever the game CRC is checked by simply searching for "DVDVIDEO-" at the start of every sector (it was observed that video files inserted by AnyDVD always begin with either "DVDVIDEO-VTS" or "DVDVIDEO-VMG"). abgx360 is unable to fix game data corruption because it has no way to know what the data should be; it only knows what the resulting CRC should be (assuming a verified ini was found for that game) and the only way to fix bad game data is with a PPF. Other forms of game data corruption unrelated to AnyDVD (for example: single bit errors commonly caused by unstable CPU/RAM) will only be detected if abgx360 can find a verified ini and your game CRC doesn't match.
Few different ways they catch you, from ABGX.
Playing a game early doesn't necessarily mean you'll be banned... MS isn't going to ban people that may have obtained a game early due to fuckups by the retailer (I had 20 copies halo 2 about two-three weeks early thanks to a friend of a friend). You get banned when you have a preview copy that's given out to media or reviewers (ESRB, game mags, etc), so it's still a stupid idea.
It's best to just wait until ABGX or can verify it based on a retail copy...which most of the time is after it's released.
So yeah, don't play it early unless it verifies, and even then I try to be patient
Still haven't even burned forza yet...