It looks like you are trying to read a GS1-128. The first AI in your barcode (00) is the SSCC (AI reference here), which is a fixed length of 18 digits. So you'll know that AI 15 will start right after that.
Regarding using DataWedge vs EMDK to read the barcode: DataWedge could not deal with the control characters in a GS1-128 when I tried it. Granted, this was a year ago(using .NET CF 2.0, and the most recent version DataWedge available at the time), so things may have improved since then.
The EMDK should read GS1-128s correctly. When you attempt to view a string representation (say, in a debugger), you may see something funky, because FNC1 is a non-printable control character. But internally, all the bytes should be there.