No new YouTube content in four days

minckster · #1 July 22nd, 2007, 02:24 PM

I haven't had any new YouTube content on my Apple TV in four days and am completely out of ideas on ways to fix it. Any suggestions?

The problem appears unique because I can't find any mention of a similar problem on the Internet.* What tells me that I don't have any new YouTube content is that the newest video in "Most Recent" is dated July 18 (four days ago) and that "Today" for both "Top Rated" and "Most Viewed" has been empty for two or three days.

Besides resetting the modem, routers, and Apple TV, I've gone all the way to restoring the Apple TV to its factory condition and reinstalling software version 1.1. I also tried an Ethernet cable directly from the Apple TV to my cable modem and a wireless connection to my neighbor's network. (He has Earthlink and I have Road Runner, but they're both from Time Warner.) I got the same selection of YouTube videos on all cases.

Is anyone else having this problem? Any suggestions for further debugging on my part?

* Edit to add: I'm not the best Googler in the world, so feel free to show me up if you can find some mention of a similar problem. I went through discussions.apple.com pretty carefully though.

symphonix · #2 July 23rd, 2007, 01:48 AM

The content provided to AppleTV and iPhone isn't *directly* from YouTube's core system. Rather, the YouTube videos need to be translated into H264 format. A system has been built by YouTube and Apple that will do this automatically, and it is translating the entire library of YouTube videos into the new format.

At the moment, it hasn't finished this task, which is why the number of videos you'll have access to on iPhone or AppleTV is lower than the number of videos if you access YouTube from your computer. The translation is catching up quickly, though. I'd expect that if you find you don't get any new content for a few days, something may have gone wrong with the servers that are handling this translation.

Eventually (in a few weeks, at a guess) the entire YouTube library will be translated across to the H264 format.

**fryke** · #3 July 23rd, 2007, 03:24 AM

A few months or years, I guess... :/ *nothing* I have looked for so far has been on AppleTV's youtube catalogue.

Ferdinand · #4 July 23rd, 2007, 03:56 AM

Be patient - Youtube has so many videos, you got to give them time to change all formats to H264.

minckster · #5 July 23rd, 2007, 05:53 AM

Perhaps I'm not being clear. If I go to "Most Viewed" or "Top Rated" there is literally a blank screen under "Today". I don't mean there's nothing interesting, or nothing I want. I mean not a single, solitary video whatsoever. ("Today" isn't my search term. It's a built-in category of everything from that day.) Put another way, there is not a single video anywhere posted after July 18. Is anyone else seeing that on their Apple TV or iPhone?

I find it difficult to believe that YouTube hasn't converted a single new video in four or five days. They'd either have to be converting only old stuff or none at all. Neither seems likely.

I also find it difficult to believe that all Apple TVs and iPhones have blank pages under "Most Viewed" and "Top Rated" and no one has said anything, anywhere publicly for four or five days.

**fryke** · #6 July 23rd, 2007, 04:14 PM

oh, no, nothing empty there. so it _does_ seem like a local problem, probably network-related... (then again, you _can_ load the videos that you _do_ find, right?)

minckster · #7 July 23rd, 2007, 05:03 PM

Fryke, Thank you very much for checking! Yes, I can view the available videos, rate them, save them as favorites, or report them as inappropriate. Scrolling to the bottom of "Most Recent", my Apple TV reports that 20,500 videos are available. Do you have more than that?

I'm going to try a bunch of different videos and ensure that I can view everything. I figure that the videos are streaming from different servers around the world and not one place. Maybe I can't reach a critical server.

Should I be able to discover what IP address and port the Apple TV is trying to reach? Maybe by turning on logging in my router? I've never done anything like that before.

minckster · #8 July 23rd, 2007, 07:46 PM

I'm not alone!

I finally posted the issue at discussions.apple.com and already got responses from people with the same issue. I feel better just waiting now, but if someone comes up with a solution that's even better.