No Picture on AppleTV

[SilverAlien]

Recently upgraded AppleTV to 2.2 software, and now none of my foreign movies are displaying picture. Audio is heard but no picture.
US release play fine, and all movies were ripped using the AppleTV setting in Handbrake.

Anyone have any ideas.

[SilverAlien]

Update:

Did a factory restore to 2.0, and all works well again.

Not sure what was going on with 2.2...BTW these are Bollywood movies, and all US movies play fine

[blazo]

Same problem here.

All of my PAL movies or TV shows encoded with HB 0.9.2 do not play on aTV 2.2. Had to manually downgrade to 2.1 to restore functionality to my aTV.

In my case aTV only shows black screen and it is possible to get back to menu if I only press "Menu" button. If I fiddle with skip/play buttons aTV freezes. Content puchased from iTunes Store plays fine and also some toons converted with iSquint play as well.

[SilverAlien]

Not 100% sure yet, however I believe this has to do with the new switchable subtitle functionality in aTV and Handbrake burning the subtitle in to the picture.

Example: I had 'Legend of the Shadowless Sword' ripped with subtitles burned in, and now I have a problem with that movie as well.

I did a test last night, and re-did the movie using Handbrake w/o subtitles. Now it works fine. Is there a method coming to add subtitles as an additional audio track?

[zero hectic]

OK, I think I just figured something out. This seems to work for me, but I'd love to hear other people's experiences.

Under Settings/Audio & Video/Audio Languages, I noticed that Chinese & Russian aren't available. All the movies I've been having trouble with have either Chinese or Russian dialog tracks.

I opened one of my movies in Quicktime and selected Show Movie Properties.

I selected Stereo/Other Settings. The Language was properly set as Traditional Chinese. I reset it to English.

I next went to Surround/Other Settings and did the same, Traditional Chinese to English. This wouldn't apply unless you have two audio tracks in your file.

I re-saved the file. Quicktime will append your file with .mov. Changing it back to .m4v or .mp4 seems to make it unplayable.

Added the file back into iTunes and suddenly it's perfectly playable on the ATV.

So it seems that, at least for myself, it's not the subtitles that are causing the problem. ATV won't properly play a file that's tagged with a language that's not available in the Audio Languages menu.

Does anyone know of a way of changing this language tag (?) without having to go through the trouble of opening/editing/resaving it in Quicktime? An applescript or app that can automate the process?

[SilverAlien]

zero I will try that later on today...I am still having a problem with all of my Indian movies...Where the language is set to Hindi.

Are you using quick time pro, and did you import the file as an .mov ?

[zero hectic]

I'm using Quicktime Pro. I opened the file with Quicktime, made my changes and did a "Save as...". I don't believe it re-encoded, simply changed the extension to .mov.

[SilverAlien]

Got it to work...

Here's what I did:

1. Ripped using ATV setting in Handbrake (Used development snapshot 3, had some audio/video sync problems that the latest snapshot fixed)
2. Added tags using MetaX to .m4v file
3. Followed zero's instructions for changing audio language properties using Quicktime.


All works well now, hopefully Apple will add additional language support soon.

[zero hectic]

A person posting on the Apple Discussion Board suggested using Dumpster as a faster method to edit the language setting, but didn't give any details on how to proceed. Hoping someone will share some details soon.