A few weeks back i began importing my DVD collection to my new iMac, using Visual Hub to take DVD sources (video_ts folders) and converting them to H.264 mp4 files.
I had all of these converted movies (about 30 of them) in my ~/Movies folder, when it dawned on me that I could use iTunes 7 to have a nicer way to look at my movie collection and still be able to browse the movies via Front Row.
The problem started when I tried setting custom art for each movie, once it was imported into iTunes. Apparently, it's not as easy as copy and pasting artwork into the movie's Artwork tab in Get Info in iTunes (for some ungodly reason.)
What happened was deleting the current art, and then hitting Ok would completely hang my entire system. I couldn't even move the mouse. I had to hold the power button down for 6 seconds for it to shut off and then reboot. This happened about 5 times before I was convinced that every time i tried to do this, it would be the same result. Checking out Console.app, i tried to find something telling from System.log and Console.log, and i thought i had found something that pointed to bad ram. However, a thorough 3 pass test with memtest eased those concerns, and the problem points back to iTunes.
If i go into iTunes and select a movie I imported, go to its Artwork tab in Get Info, and delete the current artwork, the movie becomes a full length "movie" of just a white screen and no sound. I cannot for the life of me figure out why deleting artwork consistently (three separate movie files) ruins my movie files.
If i open the files in Quicktime, it's the same thing. But if i look up the movie's properties, it still says i have an audio and video track at the expected bit rate...so i'm not really sure, maybe i can fix these videos as it seems the video is just being masked by an all white screen.
So my question is three-fold:
1) Why does deleting the artwork from a movie in iTunes render the entire movie file useless?
2) Is there a way to fix this?
3) Is there a way to add custom artwork (perhaps the movie's poster art from Wikipedia) to a movie file in iTunes without it destroying my movie?
Please help!
I should mention that i tried redoing the artwork on a brand new OS X user, and got the same results...a white-screened movie with no sound.
MacOS X 10.4.8
iTunes 7.0.2
2.33 GHz iMac C2D, 2GB ram
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