The selected video could not be played. The format was not recognized.

I experienced this on one of our two Apple TVs after upgrading to the new version 3 software. The solution here was to restart the Apple TV and after restart the problem was gone.

Hope if works for you.

Dave

I have been having the same problem from even before the 3.0 upgrade. I was hoping the upgrade would fix it. While this was an occasional problem with iTunes 8, it seems to have turned chronic with iTunes 9.

The annoying "solution" that seems to work is to unplug and replug the Apple TV and quit and restart iTunes. Even then, while watching TV Shows or Movies continuously it seems to work, but after any interruption, either due to shutting off the Apple TV or letting it go to screen saver for an hour or so between shows or movies, iTunes loses it from the device list, and the "format not recognized" message returns.

I experienced exactly the same. No clue yet. Even going back to factory-settings (software version 2.1) on my AppleTV and upgrading to 3.0, followed by a new sync of all of my music and movies showed this problem.

Format not recognised may indicate that your content can't be found rather than it being the wrong format, have you tried rebuilding your library.

Isn't this fun? I received this message last night. This problem has been occurring since AppleTV came out, but apparently it's not important enough to fix.

There's no rhyme or reason behind it. I can back out to the main menu, go back in and try to play the movie again and it will work.

If you had to rebuild your library, it wasn't a problem with the tv.

I had this same problem last night among other issues with iTunes. After going into the Computers section on the AppleTV and disconnecting from my library and reconnecting, I was able to stream content again.

The OP's issue was that they couldn't stream SOME content, was that the same problem that you had, or could you not stream any content.

Bryan Kennedy wrote:
Isn't this fun? I received this message last night. This problem has been occurring since AppleTV came out, but apparently it's not important enough to fix.

There's no rhyme or reason behind it. I can back out to the main menu, go back in and try to play the movie again and it will work.

I think this often happens when for some reason AppleTV has lost connection with iTunes - the item is in a list to play but connection was broken, even briefly and AppleTV seems to remember this, even if it has been re-established.

The error message is inaccurate and generally means the item can't be accessed (or at least AppleTV thinks so) - when you back out and re-enter the menu the device realises the connection is available so it plays.

That's what I've experienced anyway, may not be the same for all - still a a crazy state of affairs.

I could not stream any content. I tried several movies, tv shows and songs. I have my apple tv set to stream everything from my media server. I don't store anything on the apple tv hard drive.

Before disconnecting from the media server, I tried restarting the apple tv and iTunes several times.

Message was edited by: techserv2

Thanks for replying.

It was a different issue then.

Could you clarify what you did to "rebuild" your library. Is that a process in iTunes?