Sunday, July 29, 2007

Meet the RailHawks

Today, we took the kids to a "Meet & Greet" for the Carolina RailHawks professional soccer team. You might recall that this is the team who I had a hand in naming last summer.

Here are some photos of the kids getting the players to autograph their RailHawks' shirts.

Friday, July 06, 2007

HOWTO: Fix the "Error - 2002: a bad public movie atom was found in the movie" problem with mp4 video in iTunes / Quicktime on Vista

Ever since I got a new computer, I've been going mad having problems importing video files into iTunes. About 50% of the time I try to import a video file into iTunes, nothing happens. If I try to open this "bad file" in Quicktime, I get a ""Error - 2002: a bad public movie atom" message in a popup box.

The crazy thing is this file works fine on any other operating system besides Vista.

I've searched all over the web and I've not been able to find a definitive solution to this problem. From what I can gather, it has something to do with some sort of interaction between Vista, Quicktime, and iTunes and how the three of them deal with the ID3 tags in the mp4 file. I was on the verge of just boxing up my computer and sending it back from whence it came until I stumbled upon this hack.

So here's a workaround that seems to be working for me. If you're having this same problem and this works for you, please leave a comment so I'll know that I've really solved the generic problem and not just some strange situation on my computer.

Step 1: Grab the Tagger software (and make sure you have a current JRE installed)

Step 2: After unzipping/untarring the software, double-click on the executable JAR file "tagger.jar"

Step 3: Use the "File | Open" menu option to open the MP4 you are having trouble importing into iTunes.

Step 4: Edit one or more of the tags using the Tagger software and click SAVE.

Step 5: After Tagger finishes writing the new file with the new tags, add the file to iTunes like you normally would.

I hope this works for you like it did for me. Let me know...