iTunes keeps losing movie thumbnails

I've been dealing with this problem as well. Trying unsucessfully to set poster frames for videos for a kid who can't read yet and who needs the images to know what they are so he can play them. It all worked in the past and I couldn't understand why it stopped working consistently.

I became convinced that what I was seeing had to be an iTunes bug, and the reports here are even more persuasive that this is the case.

It's not clear that it's on Apple's radar, though. I had to look hard to find even this report of the problem.

Regrettably, the iTunes 10.2.2 update (just released) does NOT fix the problem.

I don't think anyone's noticed except the four of us here.

I too hoped that the newest update would fix this particular problem. What a disappointment! I don't even know why Apple would change this particular feature? It's not like they rewrote iTunes 10 from scratch, is it?

Me too! I have lost most of the thumbnails. They are videos I downloaded from youtube. All of them have very long names. Since many movies are clips from the same episodes, the names would be the same if truncated. I wonder if that confuses iTunes.

Anyway this is totally uncool. I will need to abandon iTunes in managing my videos.

BL

I've recently noticed something odd. This issue doesn't apply to newly added videos if they've been encoded to iOS friendly format (e.g. MP4) using Quicktime Pro (I don't use Quicktime X—I hate it). Whenever I use another application, for example Handbrake, then the poster frames don't stick.

I tested this theory with older videos as well. The ones I'm sure I encoded using Quicktime Pro are okay, the others not so much.

I don't know if you have tried this, but in order to fix it, I have gone into the movies and set album artwork. I just go to google images and look for the poster frame for the movie, copy the image and then paste it into album artwork and it keeps the image. Works much better than trying to "set poster frame" in the movie.

Doug Scripts . com Re embed artwork. Highlight all offending items and run this script from the toolbar. :-)

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=reembedartwork

I've been in the field of Software Testing over 15 and this is a direct result of something that was rushed, and/or a poor test strategy.

The workaround is you right-click on the movie file in iTunes, select "Get Info", click the "Artwork" tab to ensure movie poster is there, and then close. The actual step to click the "Artwork" tab might be optional but I did it the first time so it defaults to opening that tab for ever movie after that.

It's a simple refresh issue that should have been easily caught in the their testing cycles.

Obviously the workaround is not ideal if you have hundreds or thousands of videos in your library, so hopefully Apple will catch wind of this issue and provide an update without having the user to manually reload their video libraries.

Update:

I'd also like to point out that many people (like myself) spend a great deal of time making their libraries look good (as I use AppleTV as well and have a nice movie library on my television to view). This is a critical part of the end-to-end user experience and a very common use-case.

Previous to the last update, I noticed the use had to page through all the movies in the iTunes library (after initial import) to get the movie posters to appear/refresh.

Just a suggestion.

I do agree with you, but saying "Fix this issue NOW" is not the way to go about getting issues fixed.

You need to describe the problem, discuss any workarounds, explain it's criticality (use-cases for when this issue would get discovered). This will be a much better way to escalate the problems.

Otherwise a ticket gets entered into their system and their development group has to try and duplicate the issue and assess it's importance. In other words, it adds a great deal of time to the development process.