iTunes Video and Artwork Issue

[Burninator]

I am having a strange issue with iTunes.

For the past couple weeks I have been ripping and encoding all my movies so they would work on the Apple TV using handbrake. I imported a couple into iTunes to test them out and make sure they would work. They played just fine and the artwork applied to it showed up. I can't recall if this was the latest version of iTunes or not, but I am pretty sure it was. I was running Vista at the time.

Fast forward to now. Latest iTunes and Windows 7. All the videos that I encoded don't play in iTunes. The progress bar at the top shows the title and the time but doesn't go past 0.00 and doesn't switch to the player. Artwork does not work on the videos no matter how I try to apply it. Videos that I buy from the iTunes store work perfectly fine. Play in iTunes and I can edit the artwork. And all the videos that I encoded with Handbrake and the videos from iTunes all play on the Apple TV just fine.

Not sure if it's an iTunes issue or an issue with my computer or what. But I would really like to have the artwork on the videos as having a nice interface to browse through is one of the reasons I got the Apple TV.

[Burninator]

Well I fixed my issue, mostly by fluke.

I moved all my video files to a different hard drive. I ended up deleting everything out of iTunes and then bringing it back in. I'm sure that wasn't the best way to have gone about things because all the editing of the video's "Get Info" that I had done went away. Needless to say I wasn't happy with the time I had wasted doing that. But it made me realize that fixing info in iTunes is a temporary fix. If I move files again or get another computer all that is lost. Why on earth iTunes doesn't edit metadata is beyond me, but I found a program that does.

MetaX for Windows. I believe the Mac version is quite popular.

Not only did it add the season and episode number to the video, but it also added the description, changed the show title, and even chapter titles. It also added the artwork that I wanted and much to my surprise when I brought the newly metadata'd videos into iTunes they played. No idea why that happened, but I am not complaining. Now my Apple TV looks much better.

Anyways I thought I would share my fix if anyone else has this problem and also to complain that iTunes is stupid for not editing metadata.