Mac TV app videos missing on Apple TV Home Sharing

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Level 1

10 points

Mac TV app videos missing on Apple TV Home Sharing

Apple TV 4K 3rd gen tvOS 26.0.1 (was happening on last tvOS, too)

Mac Mini M4 Sequoia

I put lots of videos into TV app on Mac and then watch them on Apple TV via Home Sharing.

Some of the videos that I put in the TV app don't show up on the Apple TV. The missing videos show up on the Mac and play just fine. I don't see anything different about these videos vs the others. Probably less than 1% of videos are not showing up.

Any ideas on what could be causing this and what I can do to fix?

Apple TV 4K (3rd generation)

Posted on Nov 17, 2025 4:47 PM

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Answer 1

chefmitch Author

Level 1

10 points

Nov 18, 2025 6:11 AM in response to Urquhart1244

All the videos come from the same source so I don't think it is an encoding issue, but it's possible.

I tried running some of the videos through handbrake to make sure they were in a compatible format but that didn't help.

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Answer 2

Urquhart1244

Level 10

146,094 points

Nov 17, 2025 8:34 PM in response to chefmitch

For the media files that do not show up on the Apple TV box side, please check the codecs and tagging.

- Home Sharing files are best supported in H.264 AVC or H.265 HEVC video with AAC or AC3 audio.

- H.265 video should have codec ID “hvc1”, not “hev1”, to be well supported on the Apple TV box. This can be changed losslessly using ffmpeg, if needed. Such files would also fail in QuickTime Player.

- MPEG-2 video (like from DVD) can be added to the Mac Library, but is not supported for Home Sharing.

- MPEG-4 Part 2 aka MPEG-4 Visual aka H.263 aka DivX aka XviD can be added to the Mac Library, but would not be supported for Home Sharing anymore.

- 4K media should not be tagged as 4K. No resolution tagging, or mis-tagging as HD, would be supported.

- Video should be progressive, not interlaced.

- Video chroma subsampling in the file should be 4:2:0, not 4:2:2 or 4:4:4.

- Media files should be in an .mp4, .m4v, or .mov container.

- Dolby Atmos media is only supported when using AC3 with Atmos, not the Dolby TrueHD variant (like on Blu-ray).

An analysis tool like Invisor Lite can help finding these properties.

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