Movies won't play: black screen

[Christian]

A number of videos that I've converted from DVD and compressed using Videora don't play on my iPod. They play in QuickTime (although it stretches them to 4:3 so they look funny) and they also play fine in iTunes. According to iTunes, all of these movies are already converted to iPod format. However, when I put them on the iPod and try to play them, it just displays a black screen with the play symbol initially displaying, then disappearing and then returning again. While it's doing this the hard disk can be intermittently heard spinning. Sometimes it will go back to the menu after a few seconds, other times it will stay with the black screen displaying and hard disk going on and off indefinitely until the battery runs out. Another very odd thing that happened with the same set of videos is that it played a completely different movie to the one I selected. It actually did this three or four different times because I kept trying in case I was somehow accidentally selecting the wrong movie! After I reset the iPod, it stopped doing this and simply displayed the black screen.

After searching the forums, I noticed a number of people experiencing this strange behaviour late last year but no one had an answer. Are people still having these problems? Has there been any solutions identified?

For the record, all of these videos were encoded with H.264 and the people who had made the previous posts regarding this problem seemed to be mostly using MPEG/2.

[Christian]

I'm pretty sure I've found the solution to this problem. The movies I were encoding were 16:9 enhanced and I was encoding them with 320 x 240 resolution. These would play fine in QuickTime (although distorted as I already mentioned) and looks perfect in iTunes but wouldn't play at all on the iPod -- as I said, the screen would just go black and then it would shortly return to the menu. Note that this problem occurred regardless of whether the transcoding was set for full screen or 16:9.

By encoding these at 320 x 176 resolution (with 16:9 also set), the problem is solved -- at least for all of the six movies that I tested this on. I don't know whether this will solve the original problem reported by other posters in this forum late last year, but it might be worth trying.

Regards,

Christian.

[sanchez786]

Christian,

I've already posted my solution to this problem but anyhow, I had a movie that was over 2 gigs...I played in Itunes and it worked fine...On the ipod however, it blacked out...
After I split the file in half it worked perfectly. It seems the Ipod has problems with move files over the 2 gig mark...hope this helps!

[Christian]

This was definitely not my problem because the movie in this case was only 50 minutes and the file was only a few hundred meg. As I've already said, I'm pretty sure the problem I had previously was related to the resolution of the movie and the fact that it was 16:9 but the transcoding resolution didn't match this aspect ratio.