I've seen this particular issue come up in the forums before but the fixes didn't really help out in my case and I may have pinned down the issue with my situation, at this point I'm looking for some insight as to why things are ending up the way they are.
On export ME reads the XML file, loads the metadata, and opens the encoder. Everything loads just fine and when I hit start I get a black frame in the preview window and it never starts. I can hit pause and play, the stop button doesn't respond, and if I close it out while it's "running" then there's no issue. If I hit the stop button the encoder flatout stops responding and I have to manually kill a bunch of leftover processes via the Task Manager.
I tried a few different export formats, but this is coming up after I had just done a project where I exported 13 videos (with edits, AE comps included, etc).
I removed some mp3 audio tracks from the sequence (leaving 1 audio track containing audio from the camera) and it exported just fine; Adobe lists .mp3 as a supported audio format for export.
So I converted (via iTunes) my mp3 files to AAC (.mp4) and tried again. Same situation.
The audio files were downloaded from Free Music Archive and I have had success with these kinds of audio tracks before.
QT has been updated. I'm running CS5.5.
My question is this, has anyone else had this issue? If so, are there workarounds or anything I'm missing in this case?