iTunes – A Story of Love and Hate
I have been a fan of iTunes for a long time. I really like how well it works, how well it manages my library, and how the program has steadily improved over time. However, it is not perfect, and frankly, the problems it has do not seem to make any sense.
Over the past many months I have been converting my DVD’s to an Apple TV compatible format, so we can get away from using discs, and all of our movies are accessible on the network, on demand. I use Handbrake to convert the movies (it is a great program if you have not yet used it). I then import the video file into a networked iTunes library, apply artwork, modify title, add date, and genre. That all works just fine.
The problem I am encountering is when I wanted to do anything more than that. I want to populate the “Description” field just like Apple does when they sell a movie. I want to populate an MPAA rating, just like Apple does.
After doing some Google-ing for solutions, I am part of the way there. I first looked for a solution to the “Description” issue, and found Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. This is a great site for Applescripts (and even some VBScripts for Windows users out there) that can do all sorts of unique tasks to your iTunes library.
After getting the description data into my movies, I decided to tackle the MPAA ratings, but I can not. Not easily anyway. While searching through the above mentioned site, I found this post about the MPAA issue.
Essentially, someone wrote an application to add things like MPAA ratings, but it has to re-rip the file to make it happen. While that solution does work, it would take a significant amount of time to do this to my 100+ movies already converted.
This all comes down to a failure on Apple’s part. This is a failure to provide consistency in the user interface. If you are making custom properties editable in iTunes, why not make them all editable? (Especially fields that you use!) Why in the world would you not allows a user to add a description and a rating? That makes no sense. Apple, please fix this mess.
Hi,
Take a look at MetaX, no re-ripping required, it just re-writes the file which takes no time.
http://www.kerstetter.net/page53/page54/page54.html
I’ve re-done all my iTunes movies using this and it works great.
Scott
Actually, MetaX does have to do a similar process as the other app (at least when you populate an MPAA tag). It looks like MetaX will automatically overwrite the original, though.
Try this with a movie file stored on a network share. You’ll see it create a new temp mp4 file, etc..
Thanks for the program though, it seems more stable than the lostify app.