Hi and welcome to iLounge.
I'm fairly convinced at this point that the description issue that has been reported is simply a bug that will hopefully be resolved in the next version. I haven't actually looked into this specifically as I'm not affected by this issue, but I think it's actually an attempt to fix a
prior problem with the Apple TV that has existed since it was released in September.
There are actually
two fields used for Description information in iTunes. The main "Description" field is limited to 255 characters in length and can be edited in iTunes. The "Long Description" can only be set through third-party tagging utilities, but is effectively unlimited in length (if there's an upper limit, I've never hit it). The "Description" is what is shown in the iTunes column view, and the "Long Description" is what appears in a pop-up window if you click the "info" icon to the right of the description field in the column view.
From the beginning of encoding my own videos, I have used both the "Description" and "Long Description" fields. I generally place a very short one or two sentence description in the "Description" field, and then place the much more detailed description from the DVD insert or a source like tv.com into the "Long Description" field.
The first-generation Apple TV always displayed the "Long Description" field if it was filled in, and fell back to the "Description" field if not. The "Comments" field in iTunes was also usable for descriptions at one point as well (from before the days when iTunes let users enter an actual "Description"). This worked quite well, as the assumption was that you would want to display the most detailed description possible.
With the second-generation Apple TV, suddenly the Long Description was getting ignored entirely, and only the main "Description" field was being used. This created an even stranger situation as some of the iTunes Store Movies and TV Shows included oddly-truncated short descriptions, although iTunes Store content always includes a proper Long Description entry.
So for me, iOS 4.3 actually
fixes this problem by returning the display of the "Long Description" so I can see the full description of my content, and not just the rather short and often-useless one or two sentence summary. Unfortunately, it appears that Apple simply switched which field they were using rather than falling back to the description field in the cases where the Long Description is empty like the first-generation Apple TV did. Obviously for iTunes Store content this is going to be a huge advantage, but will be less useful for those who are importing and tagging their own content, unless like me they've been using the Long Description field all along.
In fact, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that iTunes 10
does seem to fall back to showing the Description as the "Long Description" while the Apple TV does not. You get the small "info" icon on
all description fields now, but if the "Long Description" is blank, the pop-up window will simply show the "Description" field. Prior versions of iTunes omitted the info icon if no long description was available.
Note that if you're a Mac user, it's actually almost trivial to fill in the Long Description field using an AppleScript. You could easily just copy all of your Description fields over to the Long Description field which would probably make everything show up correctly on the Apple TV. Something like the following should work:
Code:
tell application "iTunes"
set myshows to selection
repeat with eachshow in selection
set desc to description of eachshow
set long description of eachshow to desc
end repeat
end tell
Just select a bunch of tracks in iTunes and run this through the AppleScript editor and it should quickly go through and copy all of the "Description" fields over to the "Long Description" for each track.