Apr 08, '05 10:06:00AM • Contributed by: SmokyMcPott
Howver, it was then that I discovered that for some reason, iTunes will only let you play videos off of the iTunes music store, and you can only play these when online. I find it odd that I can watch QuickTime movies online, but that I can't watch local QuickTime movies via this same program. The odd thing is that iTunes can handle many attributes of the video files. For instance, you can set the artist and track name and such, just as with an MP3. iTunes remembers the meta data, associating it with the file, and letting you interact with it as you would an MP3. Also, iTunes will only play back the audio portion of local videos. The actual video doesn't play unless you're streaming it off the iTunes music store. At least these are my experiences. If you know of how to make iTunes play locally saved video files, please post a quick note about how to to this.
The meta data is similar to an MP3's data, and iTunes will use the first frame of video as artwork for the track, similar to how you can assign album images to MP3s. So it knows its dealing with a video file, I know it can play video files, since it plays the music store tracks, but iTunes will only play the audio portion of locally stored files. I spent a considerable amount of time looking into a way to associate file types to an external player from within iTunes, but I didn't find anything, so hopefully this isn't a dupe hint.
My workaround for the video limitations of iTunes was to create an AppleScript which will open all of the selected tracks externally in QuickTime. I really hope that the next version of iTunes makes up for this deficiency. It's my first working AppleScript, so go easy on it! I basically cobbled some other scripts in with some original code, but it seems to be working fairly well so far. If you can improve upon it, please post the changes back to this site so that I can learn a bit. It could use some improvement; for instance, I'll probably eventually add filtering to verify that the files being opened are QuickTime compatible before opening the player. But for now, this meets my needs.
I tied this script to a button combo via the iKey macro/automation program. I used Shift-Command-Space for an iTunes-specific command to run the script, thus space now plays an audio file (iTunes default behavior), and Shift-Command-Space plays video files.
[robg adds: I haven't tested this one...]
