itunes is messed up!

July 26, 2005 12:02 PM

Help! My itunes is acting funny.

About every 4 minutes, my itunes throws up this dialog box:

Searching for movie data in file Orig_00388eb3.IETemp

Then a second dialog box appears that says:

The movie file
"Orig_00388eb3.IETemp" cannot
be found. Without this file, the
movie cannot play properly.

Once this pair of dialog boxes show up, any song list that's playing stops at the end of the song it's currently playing. This is driving me nuts. It seems worse when I'm ripping a CD.

I'm assuming I've got some kind of corrupted file on my computer, but I've removed everything I can think of, and nothing has helped. I'm running the latest itunes, along with the latest update of tiger.

And BTW, there's nothing I can find in the Apple Support library that helps either.

posted by asavage to computers & internet (4 comments total)

I had an annoying iTunes-freezing bug and I couldn't find any information on it either. Apple's Support Library is extremely poor. I wasn't able to find anything (Google for "iTunes windows freeze" and you get a ton of old news articles called "Hell Freezes Over: iTunes for Windows")

Finally, I tried this: I deleted all of my iTunes configs. Everything under "%appdata%\Apple Computer\itunes". It worked (for me).

(This is assuming, of course, you have iTunes for Windows. The same thing in an analogous directory might work on OSX. I only suggest it as a last-resort, though.)
posted by Plutor at 12:12 PM on July 26, 2005

yeah look in /Users/asavage/Library/Preferences. quit iTunes and rename com.apple.iTunes.plist to something else, and then restart iTunes.

you might lose some settings. if stuff seems really borked up you can delete the new .plist that iTunes creates and restore the old one.
posted by joeblough at 12:34 PM on July 26, 2005

Search for your error message "Searching for movie data in file" on Google: other people have had this problem. Also this and this, which were pointed to by one of the results in the Google search.
posted by Mo Nickels at 1:39 PM on July 26, 2005

The Apple support library is sometimes helpful and sometimes not, but Apple's Discussion Groups are pure gold. Doing a search for "searching for movie data" there turns up this thread which has some helpful fixes.

FYI, when I had a similar problem a few months back, I wasn't able to find all the offending Quicktime files from within iTunes. So, I went to the finder and did a search for all files ending in ".mov" that were in my iTunes music folder. Then I deleted or moved those files. It seemed to do the trick for me.
posted by yankeefog at 8:07 AM on July 28, 2005