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graemetrigg

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 21, 2008
3
0
I'm having a terrible time trying to get movies to sync from itunes on my mac to my Apple TV. Any help or advice gratefully received!

Photos and music sync just fine. No apparent problems there. Nor do I have trouble finding ATV in the devices from iTunes. But still, every time I try to sync a movie from iTunes to ATV, it seemingly goes through the sync process with no substantive outcome. When I shut down the mac or just quit iTunes ATV has no movies in the "My Movies" section.

One of the movies I'm trying to sync to ATV was one originally bought from the iTunes store via the ATV, so I am certain there are no movie compatibility issues.

I tried to do a custom sync also - which achieved nothing except to generate a port 3689 error. I cleared the 3689 error message by turning off the firewall - but that's not such a great achievement given that the custom sync still simply goes through this phantom sync process with no eventual outcome.

As I said, maddeningly, photos and music sync perfectly - the rainbow bar on the sync page almost instantly demonstrates receiving new audio and photo content on the ATV as soon as the process starts. It never does this when syncing a movie.

So. What now? At the moment I have an expensive white and grey brick and I am very very unhappy. I would take the whole lot back to the shop if it weren't for the "told you it was a waste of money" look I'll get from the wife!

For background, I'm running a wireless network off a time capsule with one airport express as a bridge.

I feel like I have spent a totally disproportionate amount of time and effort trying to fix this (keeping myself calm by chanting "it just works....it just works....").

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.

Graeme.
 
Update - I can sync small movies

But nothing over about 50Mb. Useful, eh?

Does this start pointing towards my wireless network as the problem here?

If so why would a file bought from Itunes store using ATV sync from ATV to my mac, but not (having been removed from ATV) back to ATV from the mac?

Utterly confused.

g
 
So from what I get from your post you are trying to send all your movies to the aTV so that you can turn off the Mac/iTunes?

If you do not turn off Mac/iTunes does it work?

Have you tried the option of not syncing movies at all and see what happens? I stream everything over my TM with no problems at all.

How many movies are you trying to send to the aTV? I can't be sure, but it seems like when I first got my aTV that I tried to sync all without relizing that it would try and copy them and it aborted, and I believe it was all or nothing.

If you are trying to copy them to the aTV, have you tried to send just 1 movie rather than all of them?
 
One other thing to try. Just to rule out your network. Can you remove the airport express and still get the aTV on the network? If possible I would do that to see if there is an issue there.
I have had bridges mess stuff up in the past. Not seeing devices or having the throughput significantly decreased so that it would time out.
 
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