Quicker tagging of video content for iTunes/iPhone

Jan 09, '09 07:30:01AM

Contributed by: Mitchell

I use my iPhone a lot to watch things while traveling. Most hotel room TVs, at least where I stay, have red/white/yellow RCA jacks on the TV somewhere, allowing you to connect your iPhone and watch your TV shows or movies on a full sized screen. The On-The-Go playlist also supports adding videos, so you can easily stack up any number of movies or TV shows and avoid getting up entirely.

It's frequently awkward, however, to transcode content and tag it properly as a TV show in iTunes, because adding the tags consumes a great deal of time. Apparently, the file is fully recopied and rewitten when you add the tags, and video files can run to the hundreds of megabytes.

If you have video content in QuickTime Player Pro, however, you can accelerate this process. Let's say you have an AVI file you'd like on your iPhone. Open it in QuickTime Player Pro. Select Show Movie Properties from the Window menu. Click the Add Annotation pop up menu at the lower left corner of the Properties window, and select Title. Type in the title you'd like the episode to have, and close the window. Then, from the file menu, select Export. The file browser has a pop up for format Export, from which you should pick the Movie to iPhone choice.

Navigate to the subfolder in your iTunes Music folder where the TV show should reside. This is typically something like iTunes Music/TV Shows/Cop Rock/ or whatever show you had in mind. Wait a few minutes for the export to take place (it's about 40% of the show duration on my MacBook Pro; YMMV).

Open iTunes and select "Add To Library..." from the file menu. Navigate to the show you just exported. It will be filed under "Movies." Select the show in the iTunes main window and select "Get Info" via the keyboard, the file menu, or right clicking. You can edit the title under the "Info" tab, the show, season and episode number under the "Video" tab, and the Media Kind under the "Options Tab." When you hit OK, the save is basically instant and the show is immediately tagged properly under "TV Shows".

What I think is going on here is that adding the annotation in QuickTime Player Pro adds fields for all the tags such as media kind and so on to the file, and the tags are preserved during the export process. Skipping the annotation step makes iTunes copy and rewrite the file rather than just moving it, taking somewhat longer.

Comments (8)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090107090825274