ATV2 - why would some movies play in iTunes, but not on ATV2?

[thomapa1]

Where to start troubleshooting?
I have @175 movies in my collection. There are maybe a dozen movies that will not load on the ATV2 (I can however play them fine from withing iTunes on the iMAC).

The movie will try to load but the round wheel keeps ticking endlessly - no error message. If I fast forward the movie on the ATV2, it will give me a screen shot - but again, the movie will not load and play normally.

Movies are downloaded as native MP4, M4V formats or run thru Handbrake using the TV2 settings.
ATV2 has all updates applied, iTunes is on the latest version, iMAC is 6 months old.

Where do I look to troubleshoot? Are there settings I can look at to see how the bad movies were ripped? Any secrets on ATV2 to determine why they won't load?

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Your iMac has far superior hardware to that TV. My guess is that those select movies not working exceed the (handi)capped specs Apple selected as the best the TV can do.

You can open the problematic movies in Quicktime, choose "show movie inspector" in the "window" menu, and compare the specs of the movie to the maximums established for the TV. Often the culprit is FPS or data rate, when the movie is encoded- as you imply- for the TV.

How do you fix the problem? Often choosing the "create ipad or Apple TV version" in the iTunes advanced menu will do the trick (though that means re-converting) or you can also send it through Handbrake. Maybe the problematic ones are all "downloads" instead of those you ran through Handbrake, and thus they are not really encoded within the boundaries of the TV limitations?