"unauthorized media"

For me the solution at this moment is. I transfer the iba file to my old computer without Catalina. I open it up in iBook Author.

Next I export the version in my old computer. Next step put it on the new computer again and share it right away without open it again. Everything then is like it should be on my ipad. Off course this is not like we would like to have it. I did also report it to the IBook Author team so they should no but maybe we all have to report this matter.

Here is a temporary fix, until Apple fixes iBooks Author.

Put the video into a new Keynote presentation. Save the file.

Instead of using the media (video) widget, insert the Keynote file into the Keynote Widget.

This worked for me.

See now that i forgot something to say. Here the text again with adjustments.

For me the solution at this moment is. I transfer the iba file to my old computer without Catalina. I open it up in iBook Author. I make all the adjustments to the videofiles. I can even put the right screenshot again.

Next I export the version in my old computer. I take the external disk to my new computer and

share it right away without open it again. Everything then is like it should be on my ipad or in apple books. Off course this is not like we would like to have it. I did also report it to the IBook Author team so they should no but maybe we all have to report this matter.

It’s six months now since this new iBooks Author was first reported and four months since Apple engineers confirmed they could replicate it. So it is an acknowledged bug which appears to have been inadvertently introduced alongside Catalina. No problem with that because code is so complex unintentional bugs can always occur.

Part of our responsibility as reasonable users of Apple software is to report bugs and co-operate with Apple by sending logs, screenshots etc that they need to investigate.

Well in December 2019 I spent a few hours doing exactly that at a support agent’s request - screen sharing, following the steps support asked for and finally sending the logs they needed to look into it.

I was happy to do that believing I was taking part in a positive process to get the bug fixed so that we could all continue working on our multimedia books. I thought it was then reasonable to ask Apple to fix what they inadvertently broke so that I could use my Mac and iPhone to the full in book creation.

Four months after doing all that what is the result from Apple?

• No bug fix in the intervening four months;
• iBooks Support saying there is no news or timeline for a fix;
• Two polite, positive emails to Tim Cook asking for this to be looked at totally ignored - no reply or even an acknowledgement from his office / team;
• All work on book updates and new books stopped;
• Suggestion from Apple to use Pages but they admit it lacks the interactive features that made iBooks Author so good (e.g. pop over widget).

(One helpful poster on here suggests a workaround but it complicates the workflow)

Maybe this is because Apple think this is a bug affecting a minority. So if you have had this problem please contact Apple Support directly to inform them it affects you too. Apple have told me they don’t monitor these community forums so they won’t know how much of a problem it is from this community.

Regrettably I find Mr Cook’s office totally ignoring a loyal, genuine, courteous email (twice!) just plain discourteous. I guess I just have to accept that’s the way Apple treats its customers now.

So please, if you have this problem don’t rely on this community - inform Apple Support directly in the hope they take content creators more seriously.

It would be nice if Apple, when it knows something is broken in its software suite, makes sure it “just works’ again in a timely manner.

Thanks for the positive comment Donald Duck!

In answer to Hadrien Morand......

I emailed Tim Cook three times when there was no progress after 4 months. His email address is easy to find on the internet and will probably get deleted if I post it here. The first two emails were ignored completely - no acknowledgement even! So I don't hold out too much hope of getting listened to even at CEO level! So much for listening to the creative community.

The third time someone from Executive Relations (Ireland) got in touch with me and had a very helpful, positive attitude..

Even though this issue was reported to Apple as soon as it happened (October 2019) I've been told they don't think it is a priority and there is no timetable for or prospect of a fix. So I am focussing on this workaround helpfully suggested on here of only adding the videos immediately before publishing.

I hope this workaround does work but it has several consequences. I publish tourist guides and all of my old books get this error when I load the file on my computer to update them. It's quite complicated tracking down every video I made up to 7 years ago to re-insert just before publishing so the workaround won't make it practical to update my books.

This is a great pity because the ease of updating tourist guides, student books etc should be one of the strengths of Apple Books.

I agree using Pages is no alternative as it misses several interactive features (pop over widgets for example).

I'm currently finishing a book I put on hold last October when this all started and the helpful person at ER (Ireland) is going to get someone to check it over.

I'm not holding my breath though because someone reported doing all that with Apple directly almost 7 months ago and I did the same - sending computer logs, examples etc at Apple Support's request) 5 months ago. I spent hours screen sharing, showing Support the issue live and compiling the logs they requested for Apple Engineering. Response? Zero!

It beats me how Apple has put out several updates to Catalina - even an update to Publisher - yet ignored their amazing iBooks Author which has incredible potential in education for example.

Most disappointing is that on their recent promotional webpage for Apple Books creation - where they showcase both Pages and iBooks Author - Apple states that videos can be easily dropped into books using iBooks Author - even though other parts of Apple know this hasn't been true for seven months. Totally misleading!

Anyway, the more people who email T. Cook the better! I owed encourage everyone on here to do it and to get their contacts to. The more Apple realises this puts a block / significant obstacle on its creative community the better.

Yes Apple know about this. I reported it and they asked me to send files back inDecember 2019. They then said they had replicated it and accepted it was a Catalina bug. Unfortunately no progress or update from Apple so I am totally blocked creating my ebooks.

Apple Support suggested I use Pages to make my next books since videos now give this error in iBooks Author. Unfortunately using Pages means you can’t use “pop over” widgets so, for example, interactive maps can’t be included in travel books. So it appears I either create my books with the buggy iBooks Author (no video) or Pages (no interactive maps). Six months after Catalina introduced this problem Apple have done absolutely nothing! So much for “it just works”.

I think there may be another bug in the way Catalina / iBooks Author now work together - or rather don't!

A lot of people have reported the "unauthorised media" bug discovered here in October 2019.

However, I have just followed the workaround suggestion in this forum and got an error message that Apple Books can't accept my book because it requires movies to be in a number of formats - including .mp4

My movies in the book - which are being rejected as the wrong format - are .mp4 files! .mp4 files created in iMovie with content form an iPhone. So they are exactly the format the error message says I should be using.

My movies were filmed on an iPhone, transferred to a Mac and edited in iMovie before being dropped into iBooks Author at the last moment before uploading.

So as well as content I own the digital rights to being rejected by IBA as "unauthorised" it now rejects my .mp4 files saying they should be in the .mp4 format! You couldn't make it up.

I will contact Apple again to see if anyone will assist in getting this sorted out. If Apple devices, programs and OS can't work together, something is seriously wrong at Apple Engineering where they have left this unaddressed for six months!

What is more annoying is that a recently added Apple webpage on book creation features IBA stating it can easily handle video content to make books more interesting!

It is rather pointless and ironic of this Apple community system telling me "you have just reached the first level of the Publishing Speciality!" because of my posts about not being able to publish because of the Catalina / IBA bug!

I will report back on any progress I make with Apple.

I have a similar problem with looots of multimedia fixed size ibooks produced since 2013 (never for public use).

Nothing has changed on my side, except now on Catalina EVERYTHING displays the same error messages, when I open the hitherto problem free “iba” files.

“NARJS, innit?”

Not good. Especially since we only have a vague promise from Apple, that “some kind” of converter will be available for conversion to Pages. I certainly hope, that will involve conversion to a “real epub3 valid” format, which the current iBooks format is certainly not.

Currently I’m moving everything out of Apple’s “fangs”.

First step: All my “.iba” files are moved to my NAS and my Windows platform. Whatever happens now is out of Apples domain. Add the extension “.zip” to the file(s), you wan’t to inspect the content, and go on from there.

Second step: Create a more ePub like representation. This involves iCloud (and putting your I iBooks into the books viewer). I have a “backup script”, that copies all content from:

/Users/<username>/Library/Mobile Documents/

to my NAS. My special interest is in the folder:

iCloud~com~apple~iBooks

where all my iBooks content is located. And that is far nearer to any valid ePub format, than anything else. Here’s a view into one of my Ibooks as seen on my NAS:

Looking into OPS gets you this:

Ahhh... now we’re getting somewhere. And a peek into assets, gives me:

You continue on your own, but it is absolutely vital, that you get this information out of the Apple environment NOW! Nobody knows, where it is placed or if it will at all be accessible that easy and especially that “organized” in the future.

Copy to your NAS, your Google Drive or OneNote or... an external disk or USB stick formatted in ExFAT (can be read anywhere else). Place it somewhere safe for later use, if Apple’s Converter offer does not pan out to be usable in real life for your purpose. It doesn’t hurt to have a copy of your iba files either, but they’re probably not that interesting in the long run. Their content is a plain mess in my eyes. But you never know, what the future brings, so... backup, what you have now!

From here, I‘m starting to “hand-convert” a few iBooks to Sigil. Discovering if that’s a viable option. If, I’ll try to optimize the conversion with a few scripts or a simple program running in Windows 10. Will NOT be released to the public in any form (life is too short to support some of the oafs feeling entitled to reserve hours, days or weeks if not months of your spare time - for free, of course ;-)

Did I say, that I’m moving out of the Apple sphere?

The iOS/iPadOS 13 and the Catalina debacles were the initiators; the extremely short notice concerning the iBooks Author, and still no Converter combined with the WWDC announcements concerning the migration to ARM made my decision firm.

I‘ve moved most of my projects to Windows 10 Pro machinery (the last machine starting this month), and for my purpose and use cases the pain looks to be relatively limited. What better to do, after a lockdown, over summer, preparing for being up to snuff again in a few months.

Pages may evolve to be a reasonable platform for many, but even if - my trust in Apple supporting their tools - and giving ample notice BEFORE termination - has vanished.

YMMV, but... the only reason I entered the Apple sphere in the first place in late 2012 was the introduction of the iBooks Author. What is more fitting, that I also follow the iBooks Author demise from the platform?

HerrieC wrote:

I try to be optimistic, interested in the possibilities of Pages. So I experimented a little with Pages, created a first book with a gallery and a short movie in it and exported the file. It shows up in Books on the Mac all right, but guess what: the problem with the cover of the book synced on iPad is still there! Again this generic ugly cover, and not my artwork.

So I'll have to use the workaround that was developed in the dedicated cover thread (Cover page cannot be displayed). I am worrying about the future of Books on iPad and the 25 books I created with Author.

Sorry to hear that Kurt, it worked for me, not on first try though.

After updating Pages yesterday I tried importing an .iba file and nothing happened. Turns out I had to update Pages once more to get version 10.1, I don't know why the latest version didn't download the first time.

After I dowloaded 10.1 everything worked. All the .iba pages with "missing"/"unauthorised" media opened correctly in Pages, with the sound files and videos (that had been missing in iBooksAuthor) at the same exact places. Nothing was removed or misplaced from the original .iba files before that media bug.

Pages asks you to save them again though, in a different format. Tried to export it as an ePub and displayed perfectly on my iPad, sounds and videos playing correctly too. So there's that.

What is missing is the "book" features, such as an index, table of contents, the ability to (easily) jump from one section of the book to the other, as the file is displayed page after page, and if you pinch to zoom out you'll just get a gallery of the pages (as in Photos on an iPhone). But this is an aspect I have not really looked at while exporting so I might have missed a few steps. Swiping through the document is a little more tedious.

Copy the media delete the old one paste the new one. Fixed

No solutions, but some progress with understanding the cause of the problem. It seems that this problem only occurs with video files. I have tried to insert several video files that I created as mov and mp4 files. IBook author ""optimizes" the file and turns it internally into an MP4 which is then "unauthorized'. When you preview the iBook, the video is there, but all you see is the widget and the "play" button. When you click the button, the video plays.

This seems to be a Catalina problem. Apple needs to deal with this and probably do an update of iBook Author. Do the Apple developers know about this?

10.15.2 may have a solution. I run Mojave so I can't check it out

Photos

• Resolves an issue that may cause some AVI and MP4 files to appear as unsupported
• Fixes an issue that prevents newly created folders from appearing in Albums view
• Addresses an issue where manually sorted images in an album may be printed or exported out of order
• Fixes an issue that prevents the zoom-to-crop tool from working in a print preview

I found out a trick to turn around the problem. For example: I wrote a book with text, screenshots, and a number of video. To update this book, as I open it, all videos front pics disappear, just the background remains. So :

• First, I update and/or modify all text and pictures stuff.
• Once complete, I drag and drop all videos one after the other, at the same place in pages where was those disappeared.
• I NEVER close the book until I have finish to place all videos (if I close and reopen, all videos disappear again!)
• I NEVER return back to previous pages of the book after videos in place (if I do that, all videos and thumnails in the left side banner disappear)
• Once all complete I use "Share" menu to create mybook.ibooks file to be published in iBookStore with new version number. (I don't use "Publish" function).
• Once done, I open the previous mybook.itmsp file in iTunes Producer, I update meta data fields as needed, update description, date and so on.
• I drag and drop mybook.ibooks file in the 3rd page (after pricing page)
• I send the stuff to Apple
• God! it works!

Hope it helps...

lgcebuk wrote:

Apple Support suggested I use Pages to make my next books since videos now give this error in iBooks Author. Unfortunately using Pages means you can’t use “pop over” widgets so, for example, interactive maps can’t be included in travel books. So it appears I either create my books with the buggy iBooks Author (no video) or Pages (no interactive maps). Six months after Catalina introduced this problem Apple have done absolutely nothing! So much for “it just works”.

The "never close and save before you share to the iBooks format" did the trick. A startup picture of the video (that can be changed with the film poster button in Author) shows up consistently in the final file. I do not upload to Apple Book store though, I create travel books (as a modern substitute for the classic photo album) with text, pictures, videos and scraps just for private reading on iPad.

I am not sure though that this video-trick has to be repeated when editing the book in a later session.

Cheers!