movies from iPhoto don't show up in apple tv

Has there been any update on this issue?

I like to view slideshows from my iPhoto events, which typically include both photos and videos (mostly .avi). Within iPhoto, it works great. I like slideshows that go from stills to video and back. While I can see from your post how to get videos to play on my ATV2, the videos (as I understand) would not play within a slideshow of the event from which they originally came. Is there yet a way to do this?

I have successfully exported slideshows from iPhoto and played them on ATV2, but I don't really want to go back through 350 events and make slideshows for each. The last slideshow I exported took over 30 mins to render.

dgalvan123 wrote:

For me, I get iPhoto videos from three main sources:
-iphone 4's: these videos work fine on apple tv; option+dragging to iTunes no longer required
-point-and-shoot olympus camera mu770: these don't play because they are .avi files; must be imported into iTunes and actually copied, as option+drag won't convert them to H.264, but regular drag will
-DSLR Canon Digital Rebel T2i: these videos appear among the photos on the apple tv, and are in iPhoto as .mov H.264 movies, but when you try to play them on the apple tv, the apple tv will choke or reboot. I suspect this may be because these videos are 1080p and very large (usually more than 100 MB), but I'm not sure.

Unfortunately, this is still the case for me, nearly a year later. I have found something interesting, though:

-For the DSLR videos: I tried an experiment. When navigating to these movies on the ATV2 by going to Photos and seeing the videos amongst the photos, the ATV2 reboots or just crashes when trying to play the movies. I always thought this was because these movies are quite huge (sometimes ~1.2 GB for a 5 minute video; likely because it is an uncompressed .mov file at 1080p resolution). BUT! I also did the following: I option+dragged the video from iphoto into iTunes, so that the movie file was not actually copied, but the movie was imported into iTunes' database. Hence, iTunes just points to the same movie file that iPhoto points to, in iPhoto's finder directories. THEN I went back to the ATV2 and navigated to the movie in the Movies section (since it was now in iTunes). That version of the movie plays just fine on the Apple TV, without crashing. But when I navigate to the movie in the Photos section, it crashes every time.

This is especially odd because both the Photos section and the Movies section on the Apple TV are pointing to the EXACT SAME MOVIE FILE. There is only one copy of this .mov file on my mac: sitting in my iphoto library directories. iPhoto points to it, and iTunes serves that pointer to the ATV2, but it crashes when I try to view it on the ATV2 through the "Photos" section. iTunes ALSO points to that same .mov file, and ATV2 DOESN'T CRASH when I access it through the "Movies" section.

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Also, I'll reiterate my main frustration: Since most of my movies come into iPhoto, I have been adding description/title information in iPhoto. My wife likes to see all the home movies grouped together in the "Movies" section on Apple TV, rather than the videos only being viewable via the "photos" section, buried amongst other photos. So, I option+drag all the photos from iPhoto to iTunes on my mac, making them viewable in the Movies section on ATV2. This works fine, even for the DSLR videos (as described above), but none of the metadata (title or description) comes with the movie when I transfer it from iPhoto to iTunes. So what do I do? I waste tons of time by copy-pasting each and every title and description from the fields in iPhoto to the corresponding fields in iTunes, movie by movie. The title is especially important, since we have 100+ home movies per year, and we use titles like "2011_08_21 Hawaii beach 1" to make our videos easy to look through on the ATV2, since ATV2 sorts the list by title.

And, of course, this is all completely separate from the workflow I use for my camcorder videos, which are organized in iMovie. None of THAT footage is viewable on my ATV2 until I actually make iMovie projects and export (and encode) those projects to iTunes. That takes time I rarely have. So the footage sits on my hard drive for many weeks before we're able to view it on the ATV2.

While I've found a collection of workarounds to make it work, so that my family can actually enjoy viewing the videos we shoot, it takes a huge amount of time and effort on my part to maintain it.

There has got to be a better way to organize home movies so they are viewable on your Apple TV! With an 18 month old son and another baby on the way, my home video library is only going to continue to grow by leaps and bounds, and this amount of manual maintenance is unsustainable.

With photos, it is seamless: Once you've imported photos from your camera into iPhoto, they are viewable on your ATV2 within minutes without any further action. Videos have a much more complex course between import and viewing on the ATV2.