From what little I've found on the net, this is an issue specific to SF.
My course loads and runs fine on ScormCloud, yet when I load the same file onto SF I get the error 'The Content Package definition is required in the manifest file'. I've been through the file and compared it to a known working file and it doesn't seem all that different - a couple of things that when changing didn't make a difference, so I don't think it's anything wrong with the code in the xml file.
So I'm at a loss - is there anyone here that has had this issue and found a solution?