I'm unable to get one movie into appleTV

[Rich1963]

I was recently sifting through my collection on my AppleTV, and noticed that a movie I had handbraked and placed into iTunes months ago was not there (Terminator 2, if it matters). I have the AppleTV set to stream movies and TV shows, but synch music and photos. I have tried renaming it, altering various bits of metadata, and even removing the artwork, in case it was somehow incompatible. My first thought was that the encode was not in an AppleTV friendly format, so I re-encoded the movie last night, deleted the old one from iTunes, resynched iTunes, and then added the new encode.

Suffice to say, it still isn't @#^*! there. And when I check the AppleTV list in iTunes, it doesn't show an asterisk stating there was a comaptibility problem and it couldn't be synched. Short of trying a factory restore, any ideas on what I'm missing here? And it's just that movie of 300+ others.

 

[Rich1963]

The plot thickens. I went home and attempted a forced transfer by selcting "synch selected movies" and selected only this movie. It finally gave me the error message that "this movie is unable to be played on the AppleTV". I figured maybe it was something MetaX was doing, so I deleted the movie from iTunes and re-added it, but without the Metadata. Here's the strange part. It was re-added with the old meta-data, as though iTunes recognized it and added the movie poster and other associated bits.

Two questions-

Is there any way to totally delete this movie from iTunes so when I readd the movie it won't immediately re-add the info for it?

Even though this movie was encoded with the same preferences in Handbrake, what could be different about this one that it is bumped from loading into the AppleTV?

It does have a lot of chapters, but I don't think this one has more than say, the two discs of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, once I joined the disks and encoded them.

 

[Rich1963]

Well, I've got it figured out for anyone who might run into this scenario. When handbrake pre-scans the DVD, it reports that the DVD is 36 frames a second. It then encodes it at 36 fps as it is set to pass-through the frame rate. Now how in the hell a DVD is mastered in 36 fps is another issue entirely... This DVD was ripped with both Rip-it and MTR (latest revision), passed through DVD2oneX and not, and encoded using both Cav's best AppleTV setting (post psy-rdo), .9.3's AppleTV preset, and the legacy preset.

I just set the frame-rate to 24.95 fps and re-encoded it and AppleTV swallowed like it should (snicker, snicker). Never run into this in 300 DVDs using pretty much the same method on all. Although I will say, comparing the original .9.2 encode with the stock AppleTV preset (just bumped the bit rate to 3000) versus .9.3 using Cav's preferences, all I can say is "Baby, you've come a long way".

Oh, and by the way, when playing the 36fps encode in quicktime, and when playing the original DVD, it plays perfectly fine, which is why I never suspected this as the movie looked perfectly normal.

 

[dynaflash]

When handbrake pre-scans the DVD, it reports that the DVD is 36 frames a second.

Two things,

1. Of course as specified by apple 29.976 fps is the limit for atv at least for anything 480p or higher.

2. Must be one weird dvd as the dvd spec calls for a max of 29.976 fps

Oh, and you are "Da Man" for finding this anamoly.

 

[Rich1963]

Dynaflash-

I actually have a post about this running over on the Handbrake forums. RHester asked me to post an activity log of a 5 minute encode based off of this DVD to supply some proof I'm not just misreading something. I will do it tonight. In the pre-scan it does say 36 fps, and once the encode is done, quicktime does report that it's 36 fps. Part of the fun of this stuff is discovering things such as this, though.

 

[dynaflash]

I know

 

[huntca]

Thanks for this post. In case you're curious, the "Hackers" DVD also encodes at 36.96 FPS

This has been bugging me for a couple days.

 

[Rich1963]

I also found that both Spawn and The Thomas Crown Affair do this. I was recently comparing the amount of movies in iTunes versus on my AppleTV, and noticed these two movies weren't on both lists. Long story short, same here.