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Overview

Despite the proprietary nature of Apple products, if someone really wants to have a completely distributable iTunes library through their Mac, Apple TV and iPod/iPhone, some work need to be put in to insure that the media in one’s iTunes is capable across all devices. Apple TV requires DVD level resolution, however movies encoded at that quality will not function on any iPod, a separate resolution is required for these devices. Aside from these issues, when developing a movie and TV show collection through iTunes some work must be done to ensure proper organization, artwork and detailed meta data. 

Why iTunes?

Some would argue that there are better media organization solutions, and I will agree that iTunes has it’s flaws, but it does two things very well that other may fall short at. Firstly, iTunes can manage an enormous amount of data. Currently my media collection runs at about 2.5 TB, growing by around 20 GBs per week. Despite this enormous collection access via my very modest Mac Mini server (1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB Ram) access through iTunes and through either of the 2 Apple TV’s throughout my house is nearly flawless. The second unique feature of iTunes is of course its distributable power. Although iPod syncing can be incorporated into some other music organization applications, no other application (that I know of), is capable of streaming to Apple TV’s, which is where the real power of on demand media can be seen.

The Tools

Before we get started, you will need a few pieces of software to ensure that you can convert, import and organize with ease.

• iTunes (duh)
  
• Visual Hub
  
• Handbrake
  
• Video Kind of Selected (Applescript)
  
• Remove n Characters (Applescript)
  
• Preview (Standard on OS X) or some other simple Image Editing Application.
  
• MetaX

Music

Music has become completely secondary in my collection, iTunes does a very good job of collecting all the art work and relevant data I need. Rating songs has always been tempting for me to do, but I can never seem to decide on constant ratings, 1 week a certain song will be 5 stars, the next week I might want to make it 3, as a result I have the common meta data filled out for music and let iTunes handle most of the artwork.

Movies

My movie collection is what I have spent the most amount of time on, when all done, every single movie you have (DVD or Digital) will be displayed exactly like movies purchased on iTunes are. The key things to add to achieve this look and searching ability are genre, poster, year, rating and description. But before we get into any of that we must start by getting the movies into iTunes.

From DVD

If you have a DVD that you want to put into your iTunes library you will start with Handbrake. Handbrake is a wonderful free open source program with at least 5 years of development behind it. Although there are a few other choices, my friends as well as the majority of blogs I read swear by it as the best Mac DVD ripping tool. One nice feature about the latest release of Handbrake is the presets that have been included. Simply put in your DVD and start up HandBrake, choose the DVD as your source and choose the longest title. Hit Apple + T to bring up the presets drawer and choose Apple TV as the preset choice. Choose a destination folder and file name and hit start. Depending on your computer this process will take anywhere from 1/2 the time of the DVD to 1.5 times the time of the DVD. When it is done you will have an iTunes ready version of the DVD, along with chapter marks!

File Conversion

Although Handbrake creates great rips of movies, they are single resolution files, meanigg that a file ripped with the Apple TV presets will not go onto iPods as their resolutions are incompatible. In order to solve this problem Visual Hub will be used. Visual hub can convert anything to anything, I wont bore you with listing all the acceptable file types, but if you look at their site, you will see that nearly every video type is covered. 

The most interesting feature of VisualHub for our purposes is its iTunes conversion choices. A few versions ago VisualHub came out with an optimize for all devices selection. This essentially creates a single file that can go onto any Apple device and change resolution accordingly. Now this does mean large file sizes, my There Will Be Blood rip comes in at 2.3 GB, but as far as I’m concerned storage is cheap and iTunes can handle the traffic, so this is the best format to keep files in. When I take files and distribute them onto my iPhone, usually I will just throw on the large files. This allows me to use the component outputs and essentially have a HD portable media device, but during long trips I will convert the files again in order to match the native (320 x 480) resolution of the iPhone. This brings the files size down considerably and will allow me to bring more of my collection with me. One extremely important note about VisualHub, YOU MUST HAVE THE MOST CURRENT VERSION OF THE SOFTWARE! Until about 2 months ago, converting a movie through VisualHub had a huge glitch in that when the file was added to iTunes and you tried to attach a movie poster to it, iTunes would crash and the entire movie file would become corrupted and unusable. Thankfully that bug has been taken care of with the new updates and Movie Poster adding is now flawless, but if you have an older version of the software and you try to add album artwork the file will be destroyed.

Adding the file into iTunes 

Everyone has a different way to organize where the actual files that are linked to their iTunes library of located. Personally I think the simplest method is to first buy a 1TB hard drive and assuming your collection is smaller than that, consolidate your entire library onto there. This will allow you to have all you media in one place (at least for now). After I have consolidated my library, I leave the “Copy filed into iTunes Music Folder” option, under Preferences –> Advanced, checked and add movies to my library have iTunes copy them into the appropriate folder and delete the original. Once your collection has grown larger than a single drive the “Copy filed into iTunes Music Folder” option is unchecked and I manually organize movies and TV shows on a separate drive using a simple model separating TV Shows from movies, TV Shows from other TV Shows and having separate folders for each season of a show. I like to leave around 50GB of free space on my original iTunes Library drive, because when I import music I like iTunes to copy it into that folder and properly organize it for me.

Posters

Now it is time to give each file its poster. I use Google Image search and try to get posters with a minimum height of 500 pixels, but it is really up to you. iTunes can handle huge poster images as well and in my opinion better quality is always better. Make sure you like the cropping of the image  you download and simply select the file you want to add artwork to, hit Apple + i, go to the artwork tab and drag it in. Once you hit okay the movie image in Cover Flow should change to the poster.

Metadata

Up until this point, the common iTunes user could figure out with enough time. But now it is time to manipulate the meta data of the .mp4 files so that they contain data for every field; ContentRating, Year, Genre, Actors, Directors, Producers etc. The goal here is to make every Movie and TV show appear as if they were in fact purchased from the iTunes store. You see, Apple has some meta tags that it fills in for the movies they are distributing through the iTunes store which are not modifiable through ‘Get Info’ in iTunes. This data is seen when displayed in either Apple TV’s interface or Front Row’s. 

Adding this data makes for a much better looking collection as you scroll through them, as well as much more capable searching. For instance, in my library I can make a smart list for and movie with Artist containing Tom Hanks and only his movies show up. As you can imagine you can get very detailed searches and find the exact film you are looking for. 

An application called MetaX is assuredly the best solution for this problem. The website can give you all the details on what it can do. But for the common collection it will go through any file you put in there and retrieve all the information discussed above from IMDB. A quick approval and the file’s meta data is updated. A restart on iTunes may be needed, but afterwards all the info will be available through Front Row and Apple TV.

TV Shows

TV Show files require the same work when on either DVD or as a downloaded file as movies above, however the organization of them is a bit different in iTunes. Separating out TV Shows into Show -> Season -> Episode allows for a much nicer looking collection across all devices, but requires a few different tools than the movies do.

MetaX allows searching through a service called TagChimp. This is a community driven meta tag database, but I at times have found it difficult to pull up specifics on complete seasons of shows. With this service you can get the same specific actors, directors, descriptions etc, but in practice I have found that simply searching for a show on Google and navigating to the right season and episode was the easiest way to finding any given episode of TV you have in your database. Descriptions look nice, but there is not yet a reliable automated way to include them in files and either way they wouldn’t be very helpful in large collections.

The path I have chosen when organizing my TV shows is simply using a script called “Set Video Kind of Selected” from Doug’s Applescripts. Using this I can import a whole season of a TV show, and then in iTunes they will be listed, usually in order by episode under the movies tab. After the script is installed I simply select all of a single season and start the script. You choose video type (TV Show), show name, season number and then episode start number. So assuming starting with 1 till the end, you can quickly get entire seasons of shows Meta data properly done with the most useful of information

Conclusion

Assuming you don’t mind on buying a lot of storage, with these steps you can be rivaling your local blockbuster with your collection in no time. I should also mention that this guide should be used on content which you are legally owner of. I don’t exactly know what the rules are on that at the moment, but just let your conscience guide you.