Movies in Itunes not showing up on Apple TV

Where are these movies coming from? What were they encoded with?

Here is the compatibility needed for ATV

• H.264 video up to 1080p, 30 frames per second, High or Main Profile level 4.0 or lower, Baseline profile level 3.0 or lower with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps per channel, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats
• MPEG-4 video up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats

Open up with QuickTime and view the movie inspector, tends to give a better picture of the encoding details

The format may or may not be the problem. Using iTunes, do an Info, check under Option for the media type. Make sure it's set to Movie. If that doesn't resolve the problem, then it sounds like the movie format itself is the culprit.

The option to choose Home video has been available for a long time. If you haven't chosen it yourself then the software that you use to create your video files has.

The only difference is that now the updated software in iTunes and on your Apple TV is able to sort these two media kinds separately. A movie is not just a movie, many users have home videos that they use their Apple TV for and have long been asking for the home video classification.

What I'd like to know is this. Is "media type" a normal bit of meta data stored in all movie formats? Is this the job of the codex or the creator application? If you look at a MP4 file using Quicktime, there is no media type meta data listed anywhere. I've never seen it using any other application, either. How can we inspect the media type before we dump it into iTunes? If the field is empty, what media type does iTunes default to?

I found a series of educational movies that got set as a TV Show, for no reason, as I used the exact same application to create them as nearly all of my other movie files.

The only certain way of reading all metadata, is to open up the movie atoms and look for yourself. It's far simpler to check it in iTunes.

You can view a lot of meta data in FCP 7, and pretty much the entire meta database in FCPX. There is no "media type" data field, although there is one called "media kind." The movie I inspected with FCPX had no "media kind" data, field was blank. Bring it into iTunes 11, media type was set to Home Movie.

iTunes must be using some other criteria to set that option field. I doubt they'll ever tell us how or why.

I think it may have been you that introduced 'media type'.

It makes perfect sense to me that iTunes would interpret a blank entry as 'home video'. Studios will almost certainly compile the correct data before releasing it.

Type. Yeah, my bad.

To default to simply Movie makes more sense than Home Movie, since the latter is a subset of the former. It's all arbitrary anyway.

edit: When you bring a movie file into MetaZ, it notes that the "video type" is empty and suggests Home Movie. It also offers Whacked Bookmark as a video type. 😀 Is someone going to tell the MetaZ people their terminology is wrong? 😉

No it's not a sub set, it's an entirely different media kind. If a movie is purchased from iTunes it is already pre-defined. If a movie I record via eyeTV is added to iTunes, eyeTV adds a movie tag, there are very few other types of legitimate movies that can make their way into iTunes, so if the application you use to create your video doesn't add a tag, it's fairly safe to say it's either illegitimate or a home video and Apple don't take well to illegitimate movies.

Some of the questions you ask have been answered in my previous replies. However the whole purpose of the "home video" category is for people who have home videos in iTunes. They simply do not want their home videos of little Katie's birthday and last weeks picnic in the same category as Superman, Ironman and Pinocchio.