This Christmas I spent some time ripping part of my DVD collection for consumption via the Apple TV ((Whilst I was initially sceptical about the second-generation AppleTV and its lack of onboard storage, this simple little box has turned out to be quite the media nirvāna)). To do this I used the excellent HandBrake, followed by MetaX to efficiently add the necessary metadata and thumbnail artwork ((without which I’d naturally be unable to relax and enjoy my iTunes library)). All was going swimmingly until we settled down one afternoon to watch one of the aforementioned films and oh, it was just one long, black image. Five minutes of furious testing and Googling later, it turned out to be a conflict between the settings I was using in HandBrake and MetaX. I’m documenting this here in case anyone else should run into the same issue ((And so hopefully won’t have to re-rip 30 or so films!)).
The Apple TV preset in Handbrake makes uses of the “Large file size” option, which can be seen below:
Now, unfortunately, by default MetaX will choke on files from HandBrake created using the above Apple TV preset. To fix this, and therefore end up with working movie files, you need to enable 64-bit mode in MetaX from within preferences ((As you can see, it’s helpfully labeled “Enable support for large files”.)) :
So, there you have it: in order to successfully pass files created using HandBrake’s Apple TV preset through MetaX, you need to enable support for large files within MetaX’s preferences.
Sad Christmas 🙁
I always wondered if I did something wrong with some of my rips. Now I know I did!
Good tip, thanks 🙂 the ’64bit’ flag is only really required for movie files over 2GB, which most end up being if they are 720P or higher.
I’d strongly recommend not using MetaX (which is no longer being updated) and go to either MetaZ (http://griff.github.com/metaz/) or use subler’s ‘hidden’ tag lookup functionality (http://code.google.com/p/subler/) behind the magnifying glass icon on the right-side.
What do you use to store all your movies (since you use an Apple TV second generation)?
I have a monster of a Drobo.
Thank you so much for this post; it was so useful, also for the ATV 3d generation!
Hi there do you have a translation?