Issues With Video Playlists

Crabitus wrote:

Any ideas? Tech support told me to write here as they said Apple engineers respond. Anyone find that to be true?

Thanks for the help

Apple/Apple tech support don't generally view these fora.

They are primarily user to user.

Sounds as though there's a software glitch either on AppleTV or iTunes.

The best route to let Apple know is:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/appletv.html

They do not reply however, but it'll get fed on to the AppleTV techies.

How do you know it's trying to play the 'next NEXT in line' not just the 'next' one?

Don't suppose your computer might be going to sleep or has external drives with media that are powering down and taking too long to wake?

AC

I finally found the resolution to this issue. I must add that it was with the help of Apple Care tech support. I purchased a Apple Care plan for it for $29, which is the cost of the tech support call alone. In all the previous posts one thing has not been mentioned. The source of the video files in question. After creating a new user, and importing said video files into iTunes fresh.. they playlists played perfectly. I tried this with many different videos over hours. Not one glitch. The difference here.. The videos were playing directly from the hard drive and not from the 2GB USB drive they were stored on. To verify this, I went back to my original user account and loaded iTunes locally instead of from my storage drive. I imported over a dozen videos (tv episodes to be exact) and created a playlist.. Again, faultless playing.

So the final diagnosis is that the playlists will function normally when streamed off the hard drive, but NOT through an external drive. This is conclusive regarding the playlists not continuing properly however, it does not exclude that the playlists may play from another type of external drive such as a firewire drive or faster USB drive. I have not had a chance to test this yet. (but I will sooner or later since my video collection is too large to store on my internal drive)

Hope this helps.

These kinds of issues are very hard to pin down as you may get the same symptom for different causes.

AppleTVs have never gracefully handled problems with file access and often give unhelfpful vague error messages, or preumably as in your examples just crash and reboot.

A corrupt iTunes library database file, missing files (eg inadvertently deleted or moved) or corrupt files could all make AppleTv hiccup.

Add to that issues with external drives or computers sleeping and taking a long time to wake, or not waking, might give timeout errors that AppleTV can't recover from.

It is often a useful step to either rebuild an iTunes library or to create a test user account to see if this helps but this is a bit fiddly and time consuming.

Sadly a memory leak/bug in the AppleTV software could also result in crashes/reboots.

AC

Interesting situation there. Since I didn't come from the original Apple tv, I can't really speak on how it handled video playlists, my only knowledge of it is that you can store video directly on the device. I wonder is it possible that with the advent of Apple tv2, that the resulting software updates incorporated this bug into the software. One other thought that came to mind was when the previous poster Alley_Cat said "Add to that issues with external drives or computers sleeping and taking a long time to wake, or not waking, might give timeout errors that AppleTV can't recover from". I haven't considered that this drive could possibly go to sleep, even though the computer is being used and the video is streaming from the external drive, but it's something to look into. I would rule out file naming and structure as I imported the original titles back into the local drive and there was no problem with the playlist running from a local iTunes library. Once we add in the external drive variable, and I use the term strictly, due to USB speeds, drive speeds, drive manufacturer, types of cables and the infamous drive sleep variable, I can see where it would be possible to have a configuration that will work, and one that will not work. The big question is which configuration will work 100% of the time. Since I have about 7TB of storage drives attached to my system, it may be possible for me to temporarily run a new iTunes library from a different drive. Then we can see if it is drive related. (of course, having the time to do it is an issue but it would be worth it if I could determine if it's ALL external drives or only my 2TB drive that's giving the problem. I guess I'll post when I have some new findings. (Thanks OP for following up on this).

I can also state that I've been performing my own tests of different external drives as well.. My observations and results. I switched from a 2TB USB drive to a 3TB USB drive, loading a new iTunes library and importing the same videos each time. The one difference was the 2TB was a MS-DOS (Fat32) drive, and the 3TB is a MacOS Extended (journaled) drive. The result..Same.. The playlist stalled after the first episode ended.

I also happen to have a firewire800 1TB drive. I have created the iTunes library on this drive and imported the videos again. This time... It is on the 4th episode with no signs of stalling. Since it's past my bedtime here, I can't really watch it all night but I will let it run and know in the morning what the results are. I am skeptical but also somewhat convinced that this will work. Which will mean, the playlists will play fine on a MacOS Extended(journaled) Firewire drive.

This basically, infers that there is a huge data bottleneck when streaming video through USB. Considering the video has to go through the computer to the external drive, back to the computer and streamed to the network to the Apple TV, It is neither uncommon nor strange behaviour for such large streams of data to reach a bottle neck through one of the many links. In this case, I think it happens to be the USB ports. It is playing fine from an older firewire800 drive. It has played 6 40min episodes without stalling between. So it's either a firewire drive, or bust.

(good luck crabitus)!

Dude, I have to tip my hat to you. All your hard work was not in vain. Out of curiosity I decided to try that program "Keep Drive Spinning" and I left it at it's default of 60 seconds.. I assigned it to the drive where I normally keep my iTunes library on. I ran the exact same playlist that originally caused me problems. I have watched six episodes of Star Trek, The Original Series (which I ripped with handbrake) and it hasn't stopped once. While all the other tests were pointless, they were necessary in troubleshooting this illusive issue but it was you who took the extra initiative to test the drive speed variable and realize it was the culprit. A heartfelt thank you is in order!

Just as a FYI, the Firewire 800 drive did play flawlessly too. It must be faster than my USB2.0. I don't know, but now I don't have to move about 400 gigs of iTunes media to another drive. I REALLY appreciate it. I would consider this issue resolved. Nice work.