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An AppleScript to open iTunes videos in QuickTime
Authored by: SmokyMcPott on Apr 16, '05 04:09:23PM

I've came up with some more "tricks" to use when storing your videos in iTunes, and thought I'd pass them along. First though, I wanted to clarify the original hint real quick:

It looks like some people thought that the hint was regarding saving the videos after playing them them in iTunes, and this isn't the case. The original hint, and the ones I'm adding today, deal only with storing & playing your videos alongside your music, within iTunes; Not with how you'd get them stored local on your hard drive in the 1st place.

Ok... Now on to the additions:

I've found that storing your videos as Quicktime .mov files result in the most flexibility, as far as what you can do with the video from within iTunes. If you own Quicktime Pro, you can easily and quickly convert your videos to similarly-sized .mov files by doing the following:

1. Open the video in Quicktime
2. Chose "Save As" from the File dropdown menu, and check the "Make movie self contained" option before saving the movie.

When done, you should have a .mov file that's aprox. the same size as the original file. Now, drag this movie into iTunes, over the library icon, and wait for iTunes to import it.

Once the movie's imported, you can assign meta data to it from within iTunes, however the thumbnail image associated with the file will be locked to the first frame of the video file. I've found a fairly straight-forward way to handle this though:

The key is adding a one-frame insert to the beginning of your movies, which will contain the image. This can be an external image, or a frame from within the movie which you feel represents the clip well. Here's how I've been adding such images:

Open the movie in Quicktime -I reccomend you do this after you've imported the movie into iTunes, and after you've opened it up for playing from within iTunes (in order to verify that you're working in the same copy of the file which iTune's tracking).

After opening the file, use Quicktimes slider to find a frame of the video that you want to use as the thumbnail. Once you've found one, hit command-E, to Export the file, and choose to 'Export to picture'. Now here's an important part: Save the picture to the same folder that the video's housed in.

For some reason, when I saved the images elsewhere, iTunes would sometimes lose track of the file, resulting in an error.

Now, open the new image in the Preview app (for most people, this means you can just double click it after saving it), hit command-A to select the entire image, and then command-C to copy the image.

Now flip back to Quicktime and set the focus to the very beginning of the file, and then hit the key combination of option-command-V to add the image that you just copied, as the very first frame of the file. Then hit command-S to save the file, and you're done!

The next time you view the video in iTunes, you'll see the picture as the thumbnail for the movie.

I realize that this is a great candidate for an Applescript, but I haven't had the time to look into that yet. Truthfully, I'm thinking that I'll wait for Tiger and then use this as a good test for the Automater application. 8)

Here's a couple of other things I've found which really help with this:

Set the genre for all you videos as "Video", and then set the "Grouping" value to the actual genre of the video content. So, for example, if I were adding a video of Nashville P*ssy, I would set the genre to 'Video', and the grouping to 'Rock'. Then it's a simple matter to make smart albums check both the genre value and the grouping value of files, to make the video show up in such a search.

Another thing I do is set the album values for videos to "[Band Name] Videos", so using the previous example, if I look up "Nashville P*ssy" to see all the music I own by them, I will see an additional album listed, named 'Nashville P*ssy Videos', which contains all their videos which I own.

Finally, I also append one of the following to the Video tracks name:
(Video Single), (Concert Video), (Multi-song Video), (Interview Video), so that when I'm browsing by artist, and the videos show up as songs, that I can tell them apart from the rest of the mp3 songs.

Also, it's probably worth re-mentioning that iTunes can play any video that Quicktime supports as a regular music file. So if you have a really cool cut of a song, but it's a concert video, you can include it with your playlists, and iTunes will treat it like any other music file.

Hope this helps someone... I think that it makes a lot of sense to store music-related videos alongside the music of the same artist, and other then having to play them externally in order to see the video portion of their content (re: my original hint), you can treat them as a regular old music file in every other aspect, meaning that you can include them in your smart lists, groupings, and playlists.

Also, it's probably worth reiterating that if you use this script to open these videos, then it's probably worth tying it to a mouse action so that you can click to open the files, just as you would any iTunes file. It makes the whole thing a lot more fluid.



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