I've been working on 
TV-ifying all my personal home videos. Until Apple allows for "Home Movie" as a video kind I've chosen to label my home movies as "TV Shows" (hey, my life might be interesting enough to be a TV show) using the year of the video in the season field, the episode number just a sequential list for that year (same as track number) and the month the video was taken as "Disc #" out of 12 for each year. A brief description in the comments field also shows up on the TV just like a real movie. Clever eh?
THE PROBLEM:
Old VHS tapes being MP4'd through EyeTV are handling the metadata tags just fine, and when sync'd toTV the comments show up, the ordering is correct based on "Season" and episode number (yes, one annoying giant episodes-in-backwards-order list from 1993 onwards), but it works.
However, when I get to about 2001 and I have personal iDVDs that I am Handbraking into MP4s, I can enter the metadata tags in iTunes, where everything behaves nicely. But when these files sync toTV, the tags are lost so there's no comments, and the season/episode is gone, so ordering reverts to an alphabetical list beneath the giant episodes-in-backwards-order list. Strangely if I stream from the same iTunes source, everything is OK. It's just the syncing that doesn't carry the metadata over from some MP4s. I can even see this when clicking on the TV in the iTunes source list, the affected videos have empty columns where the metadata should be.
Also, MP4s from my digital video camera similarly do not hold their iTunes tags when synced toTV. If I run any of these MP4s through a Quicktime re-encoding export, they are (sometimes) happy again and hold their tags when they travel to TV. I could suffer through re-encoding all the old stuff twice and be done with it, but I bought the Sanyo Xacti MP4 video camera specifically to dump MP4 videos as-is directly into iTunes with auto-sync to TV & iPod in order to experience the nirvana of full convergence, never to mess around with re-encoding again!
Any ideas what the difference in these seemingly identical MP4 file types could be, that makes them behave so differently with regards to video tag metadata as they travel between iTunes &TV?? Is there some sort of specification within the MP4 file type that would allow or prohibit it from retaining this information through an TV sync? Seems very odd...
TV-ifying all my personal home videos. Until Apple allows for "Home Movie" as a video kind I've chosen to label my home movies as "TV Shows" (hey, my life might be interesting enough to be a TV show) using the year of the video in the season field, the episode number just a sequential list for that year (same as track number) and the month the video was taken as "Disc #" out of 12 for each year. A brief description in the comments field also shows up on the TV just like a real movie. Clever eh?THE PROBLEM:
Old VHS tapes being MP4'd through EyeTV are handling the metadata tags just fine, and when sync'd to
TV the comments show up, the ordering is correct based on "Season" and episode number (yes, one annoying giant episodes-in-backwards-order list from 1993 onwards), but it works.However, when I get to about 2001 and I have personal iDVDs that I am Handbraking into MP4s, I can enter the metadata tags in iTunes, where everything behaves nicely. But when these files sync to
TV, the tags are lost so there's no comments, and the season/episode is gone, so ordering reverts to an alphabetical list beneath the giant episodes-in-backwards-order list. Strangely if I stream from the same iTunes source, everything is OK. It's just the syncing that doesn't carry the metadata over from some MP4s. I can even see this when clicking on the TV in the iTunes source list, the affected videos have empty columns where the metadata should be.Also, MP4s from my digital video camera similarly do not hold their iTunes tags when synced to
TV. If I run any of these MP4s through a Quicktime re-encoding export, they are (sometimes) happy again and hold their tags when they travel to TV. I could suffer through re-encoding all the old stuff twice and be done with it, but I bought the Sanyo Xacti MP4 video camera specifically to dump MP4 videos as-is directly into iTunes with auto-sync to TV & iPod in order to experience the nirvana of full convergence, never to mess around with re-encoding again!Any ideas what the difference in these seemingly identical MP4 file types could be, that makes them behave so differently with regards to video tag metadata as they travel between iTunes &
TV?? Is there some sort of specification within the MP4 file type that would allow or prohibit it from retaining this information through an TV sync? Seems very odd...