Add any video to your iTunes collection.

Prehistory

iTunes, as you know, works great not only with music, but also with movies. Moreover, his opportunities in this matter are very wide, and here there is a division into films and TV series, support for covers, genres and metadata. But bad luck, all this is supported only for native mov files. Installing codecs, for example Perian, does not save the situation at all. Although QuickTime perfectly plays all video files, iTunes refuses to add them to the library. Well, he does not know how to take the metadata from there!

Solutions

There are three ways to solve this problem.


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Firstly, we can compress all of our honestly purchased DVDs immediately with the h264 codec and into the MOV container. Ahem ... sounds a bit fantastic, so I’ll not develop this option.

The second option is to use reference movies. These are not ordinary aliases and simlinks. Reference Movie is a special type of MOV file containing metadata of the main video and a link to it. The size of such a link can be from several kilobytes to a couple of megabytes. Such a file can be perfectly added to iTunes, it eats it, indexes it and when opened it will lose the main file, in whatever format it is, if only QuickTime has the necessary codecs.

Finally we can change the container of our video file. Without going into the details of the video structure, I’ll just say that the usual AVI is usually a set: video encoded with the Xvid or DivX codec (although it is also possible for others) and audio in AC3 or MP3 format. All of this is packaged in an AVI container, which iTunes just doesn’t like, since he doesn't know how to get the metadata from there. So what's stopping us from taking audio / video tracks and packing them in a MOV container? As it turns out nothing! This whole procedure will take in time as a simple file copy. In addition, you will have one file, not two, as is the case with the reference movie.

Meet iFlicks

You can create a video link for example using QuickTime, choosing the appropriate type when saving the file, although if you need to do this for all seasons of your favorite series, you should think about automation. But to change the container - the task is not so trivial. In addition, there remains the problem of metadata. The resulting files will contain neither descriptions, nor genres or covers - all that makes using the iTunes library so enjoyable.

Here iFlicks comes to the rescue . It will not only automatically create video links or change the container (of your choice), but will also independently find the description of the movie in the database and immediately add it to iTunes.

You can work with iFlicks either through the GUI or through Apple Scripts. Some examples are already in delivery. For acquaintance with opportunities I suggest will address to GUI.



You can add movies simply by dragging individual files and a whole folder into the program window. Immediately begin indexing and searching for metadata. If the program determines that the films are episodes of the series, this situation will also be correctly handled. In the case when information is not found for any movie, you can always click on the search button and edit the line that is searched in the database. In the extreme case, you can score the data manually.



When everything is ready, click start and wait. The timer, unfortunately, works very inaccurately. Fortunately, 1-2 hours which he promises for a few dozen files pour out just a few minutes. At the end of the process, the films will disappear from the program window, now you can go to iTunes and check that everything went well.

And where to choose which way to use? The main toolbar has all the necessary tinctures. Here you can specify whether we want to create a new Reference file or a full-fledged QuickTime Movie, where to put the result of the work and whether it should be immediately added to iTunes.

And finally

In addition to the obvious functional and description above, iFlicks has a few goodies. The result of the program can be put in a separate folder, and then add to iTunes yourself. In addition, the program can convert video files to a format suitable for iPod or Apple TV. Here, a full-fledged file transcoding is already underway, so the process can take a significant amount, especially since QuickTime is used. But the lucky owners of Elegato Turbo.264 will be able to enjoy the charms of the hardware encoding H264.

The main disadvantage for the domestic user is the fact that iFlicks automatically scores metadata, alas, only for English films. Domestic is simply not in the directory it uses. The developer, however, promises to start supporting other languages ​​very soon.

The license price is € 15.
You can download from the site http://iflicksapp.com/

UPD: Transferred to Apple.