iPod touch Strange Home sharing problem.

[Xandros]

Edit: See below the line for my final thoughts on the matter.

So I turned home sharing on on my computer where I store my videos and signed in with my regular Apple ID and all that. I turned it on also on my iPod touch, since I wanted to see if via Home sharing I could still watch the videos I've got on the other computer on the iPod without needing to sync anything.

Now it does work to a degree but it seems to be a bit messed up and no amount of resetting, reinitialising or reinstalling has fixed the problem. Essentilly after clicking on video on the Ipod and selecting the shared library, it appears to load, but then it only lists two of the tv shows I've got, and repeats these same shows in the list twice (in other words, the list shows four tv shows but two of them are identical to the other two).

It doesn't show any of the films or any other tv shows I've got in the list, but, if I use the search function and enter the name of a film or a episode it'll be able to find it in the library and displays all matching names, and I can then stream it and watch it without much problem... So it's not like the films and shows aren't even accessible, they are, they just don't seem to show up in the intial list, and for some reason two do but are replicated.

Have I set it up wrong or something or is Home Sharing just fucked?

====================

Home sharing is apparently just fucked. So it isn't resolved but I doubt I'll ever get an answer that isn't vague or pointless, so I give up.

 

[blueroom]

How did you compress the videos? If you sync them do they play fine on the iPod Touch?

Are you running the latest iTunes & iOS software?

 

[Xandros]

How did you compress the videos? If you sync them do they play fine on the iPod Touch?

The tv shows are all (currently) ripped DVD's I've converted to mpv format using Handbrake, in there original SD resolution. They're encoded (so optimised settings) for playback on an Apple TV but I haven't seen any restrictions other than filesize that would cause problems on the iPod, and indeed, when I do playback an episode they seem to play smoothly and display on the screen perfectly okay.

The films on the other hand are all HD Blu ray rips using similar encode settings as the tv shows except in excess of 4.5gb in size each as opposed to the 150 - 300mb the tv episodes range from- Although my only desire was to watch tv shows on the iPod, I have attempted to watch the films I've pulled through that search function and to say the least the buffering took so long I gave up. They do work; it just seems buffering a several gigabyte large movie over wifi on an iPod is like forcing a cow through a cheese grater.

Are you running the latest iTunes & iOS software?

Yes. In fact I noticed this problem with the latter iOS 4 version when I first got the iPod late last year. After I upgraded it to iOS 5 I tried again thinking my woes may have been fixed, but was disappointed to find they weren't and it was doing exactly the same thing.

I always keep iTunes up to date also, but have even gone as far as to uninstall and reinstall it, completely erasing my video library on that machine in the process and rebuilding it from scratch instead o backing it up just to be on the safe side. Still didn't make any difference.