Tekpals

I’ve been trying to set up a shared iTunes library for our entire home using one of my servers. Sharing music works well, but I was running into some problems sharing video files. I did what I usually do in these situations and search for the problem I’m having and I’m usually able to find an answer that works. (There’s also a lot of junk I have to filter through, but that’s a different post (ref).

I started with Google and searched for ‘itunes shared video’ and was surprised that many of the results were from older versions of iTunes. Many of the results referred to iTunes 6 and 7. The current version (as of when I encountered this problem) is 10! I wondered why Google wasn’t emphasizing links discussing more current versions of iTunes.

After digging through the results, It turns out there is an issue with iTunes sharing video files over Windows. iTunes is really picky about the way the video is encoded and I’m going to have to re-encode the videos.

Bing, is better than Google, but not perfect. Not surprisingly it gave me a few results talking about using a Zune with iTunes!

I do wish that the search engines are aware of the current version of software when searching for software problems.