Movies and TV Shows Missing form iPod menu -- what's up with that?

Question

I purchased my fist movie and TV episode last night to see how well I will like them on my iPod classic. I am connecting to the most up to date version of iTunes on my IBM/Win XP computer.
I watched the episode (Journeyman's first episode -- missed it on Monday...it's not bad) and was pleased. Then watched Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- also enjoyable even at the small size (especially the opening sequence which emulates "home movie" style in a very small frame).
Near the end of the movie, my iPod battery was giving up the ghost, so I paused the movie and plugged in. After waiting out the "Do not disconnect..." syncing process the main menu finally appeared on the iPod -- but the Movie and TV Shows selections were conspicuously missing from the menu! I have not seen my Movie/TV episode since.
They are in the iTunes library, obviously, but they simply never show up in the iPod menu. So far I have sync'd a number of times -- the sync settings were originally set by default to sync all songs, podcasts, TV Shows, Movies, Songs, etc... I tried "tweaking" these but to no avail. All syncs result in no Movie or TV Shows on the iPod menu.
Most recently I tried deleting all material from the iPod and then re-syncing all material back to the iPod (no help) and lastly I tried resetting to factory default settings (which originally seemed to work just fine) still to no avail.
When I select Settings >> Main Menu ... from the iPod main menu, the configuration screen also does not contain options for Movies or TV Shows.
It all makes me say "Hmmmm...." and leaves me reluctant to waste money on video media (though thank god my Tiki TV podcasts are still coming through just fine ... no Lala? I don't think so!). Nope, check that! video podcasts are not coming through either. GEEZE!
Has anyone experienced this before? Again, I've updated all iPod and iTunes software. Nothing "funky" seemed to happen to cause the problem, other than it conincided with plugging my iPod in (which kicks off the blasted sync process -- geeze these settings are a pain...I'd prefer the blasted thing to just sync on demand) >:-( Any help/suggestions would be most appreciated. Without a solution, I'll never be able to keep up with Journeyman!
Thanks
NK
Message was edited by: NoKarma4U

Answer 1

wjdavis wrote:
I can't remember exactly what I did. I do know that when I started it up, I couldn't find the Setup Assistant on the hard drive,
No, once a user has been created, you can't run Setup Assistant  (without erasing and reinstalling).
What do you recommend for fixing this?
Here's what's happened: 
When you first start up a Mac and create the first user account, OSX assigns it UID (User ID) #501.  The next one gets #502, etc.  Those UIDs (not the user name) are what control permission to files.
You can see those numbers via System Prefs > Users & Groups;  click the padlock and enter your Admin password, then select an account and right-click it, and select Advanced Options.  Do not change anything on that window.
So . . . assume your old iMac had a user 501 with the data you want; it's identified that way on the backups.
When the Apple Store started up your new Mac, and created their account, it became #501.
When you used Migration Assistant to transfer the 501 account from the iMac's backups, OSX copied everything there "as is" except it had to change the 501 to 502. 
The new 502 account has all the right permissions to things now in it's home folder, but the backups belong to user 501.
Have you added much to the Mac since you did the migration?  Have you done any new backups?  If not, while it's a bit of a hassle, one fix would be to create yet another user account temporarily.  Make it an Admin account.  Log on to it and delete all the other accounts.  Then migrate the accounts from your backups; this time there won't be a conflict, so OSX won't have to change the UUID(s).
But if you have done new backups, this won't work, since Migration Assistant automatically uses the most recent backup.  There's a way around that, but it's a bit (or more) tedious.
Clear as mud?