Technical Support

I recently had a problem streaming a video from Amazon Prime on my XBOX360. Specifically, we rented a move from Amazon Prime, but when we tried to play it in the Amazon app on the XBOX 360, we got an “Error 7313“. We checked all the obvious things like network connectivity, restarted the XBOX, and went online to make sure that it was still within the rental period. Everything showed that it should be working, but alas, we got the error message and no movie.

Call for Help

So we called for support. They were friendly enough, but it was clear that they had only canned answers. At their request, we uninstalled and reinstalled the Prime app on the XBOX. Still got the error. Then we got them config info, including the version of the app, the version of XBOX, etc. Still not working. They put us on hold to get XBOX support, whatever that means.

While I was listening to the hold music, I was looking at the config and noticed that there was only 1MB of system memory available. I guess someone downloaded an app and filled up the space. I found the app and uninstalled it. When I tried to play the movie again, it worked. Apparently, ERROR 7313 is related to available system memory.

My reason for posting this is two-fold. First of all, if anyone else gets Error 7313 in Amazon Prime on XBOX 360, check the available system memory, and if it’s low either remove one or more apps, or move them to the USB storage. Hopefully you’ll be able to solve your problem quickly.

The second reason is more from a software developer perspective. Somewhere along the way, one of the coders apparently captured the error condition in the code and gave it a unique identifier (error 7313), but they didn’t print a useful message to the console. Obviously, they also didn’t make a lookup available to the support team at Amazon Prime, either. I’ve seen this so many times that I’m no longer surprised, but to all you coders out there who just ‘catch(all)’ and don’t provide even a hint to help solve the problem, please know that you’re leaving a problem for someone else to be frustrated by later. You were so close… why not finish the job?

I understand that vendors like Amazon have taken on a big task by offering their service on so many platforms, and that is no small task to support. But since that seems to be the way things are going, they owe it to themselves and their customers to make it easier to solve problems down the road.

I sincerely hope that anyone who sees the error codes that I’ve left in code I’ve written along the way will at least find them useful enough to know where to look for the problem. And for all the times I didn’t provide useful error messages, please accept my apologies. I am, after all, still human.