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janhovden

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 26, 2010
1
0
I have encountered a strange problem, and wonder if any other have experienced the same (and hopefully also, have some suggestions for a cure).

A few days ago, my external hard disk with my complete iTunes library crashed. I used Data Recovery 3.0 and was able to recover about 2/3 of the movies and MP3s in the library. I then tried to re-add the recovered movies to the Itunes library, which seemed at first to work okay. These are DVD rips not bought from Apple Store.

Now however, none of my movies in the would play in AppleTV (streamed via LAN). Also most movies would not play in iTunes on my Mac either, but mysteriously played fine when i locate the file and open it directly in Quicktime. I tried rebuilding the library by moving the library file to the desktop and import it, which greatly reduced the number of movies in my library. All these movies plays OK via clicking on them in iTunes, but none of them will play on the Apple TV. It just starts, shows the bar with the minutes played in black, and then stays in black.

Movies I have added to iTunes after the crash, however, plays without problems in both iTunes and on Apple TV.

Another strange thing is that when I look at the iTunes folder, I find all the missing movies (which disappeared after rebuilding the library) and TV shows (in .MOV format). When I try to add them to iTunes nothing happens, but it plays without problems in Quicktime Pro (Snow Leopard).

Suspecting that the quicktime movies could be corrupt, I tried to reencode the .MOV file with Handbrake, which crashed the program. VideoMonkey was successful in transfering the movie, which could then be transferred to iTunes and played successfully on Aplle TV, but without sound.

It looks like it can be a problem with the recovered quicktime movies? Could they be rescued via some sort of reencoding/program fix? Or is there another solution? Will be happy for all tips before I restart ripping and encoding 100 DVDs to iTunes....

Jan
 

mstrze

macrumors 68000
Nov 6, 2009
1,915
0
Jan,

I don't have a solution for your encoding/playback problem, but I do hope that the first thing you did after you recovered everything was buy a backup drive.

Time Machine makes it simple to back up all your drives on your system...and with 1TB externals now running around $100 US or less, there's no excuse. It will save you the headaches you are experiencing now.

Good luck!
 
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