The Mysterious aTV Buffering Issue: Can it be solved?

Question

Hey guys, I’m really stumped here so I’m hoping someone has a clue as to what’s going on. Here’s the deal. I’ve been ripping my DVD’s using MTR and Visual Hub. Everything looks amazing my my Apple TV. Couldn’t be happier.
...until I ripped season 1 of Entrourage (from HBO). I ripped the exact same way I’ve been ripping all my stuff. Once it’s ripped I convert with Visual Hub to H.264 “for Apple TV” just like I have been all along. I import into itunes. The files look very high quality, play back perfect. Everything is great right?
So I go out to the living room and fire up the Apple TV and here’s where it gets weird. Let me first say that I stream EVERYTHING to the Apple TV. Screw this syncing crap. The Apple TV is wired via ethernet into my AEBSn and it’s been streaming like a champ from my 24” iMac. Most of the time when I click on a video file to play on the Apple TV I barely see the buffering bar at the bottom. It’s very quick. So I saw no reason to ever sync.
So back to these Entrourage TV eps. When I try to stream them, just as I have every other piece of media on my computer, it stalls out. The buffering bar goes very slowly, aTV plays two seconds of the video and then it needs to buffer again. It can’t play more than 5 seconds of the video.
My first theory was that the file was too big for streaming. Each ep is clocking in at about a 1GB. But then I realized that I’m streaming 4GB DVD rips of movies and they never have a buffering problem and they were created in the exact same manner. I thought it was a network issue but everything else streams perfectly. So how could this be? The files were created exactly the same way as everything else but for some reason it’s a no go. Then I thought that the files were incompatible with the aTV. But if I “sycn” to the aTV’s hard drives the files play back perfectly. What am I missing here? This makes no sense.
If anyone is having this issue please let me know. Again, I’m wired into the network and encoding with the standard aTV settings in Visual Hub. This is killing me. I don’t want to have to sync one show to the hard drive. I want to be able to stream everything.
Thanks!
24" iMac C2D, MacBook, aTV   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

Answer 1

I have to say that's a little disappointing because I can def see a quality differene between single and double pass encoding. Does anyone know a fix so we don't have to suffer in quality?As indicated above, the "single-pass" workflow should be the "last resort" here. Things would be so much easier if someone made an analytical utility that would graph the instantaneous fluctuation in video data rate over time. Then it would be easy to locate problem "spike segments" for user testing with varying settings in order to determine an optimum "multi-pass" changes to fix this problem. (I still have an open inquiry in the QT Mac forum asking about any such utilities.) The main problem here is the fact that every movie should be considered unique and never to depend on "fixed" settings in all cases. The best we can hope for is a group of settings that work "most" of the time for most movies. Remember, the guys who do this professionally and are really good at it are as much artists as technicians.