Home movies as iTunes TV Shows
Update: At some point, probably with iTunes 8 though I didn’t notice at the time, iTunes added support for batch changing video format, making the script featured in this post obsolete… as it should be.
Original post follows.
We usually keep our home movies in iPhoto, but recently I’ve started moving some select clips into iTunes. Unfortunately, the list of Movies quickly becomes unmanageable. These kinds of videos are much easier to work with when grouped as TV shows, but unfortunately iTunes won’t batch convert Video Kind.
So I wrote a script. In addition to defining selected movies as a show, it also tags their season with the current year and sets the Show Title. Here’s the script: (Open in Script Editor)
set showTitle to display dialog “Enter TV Show Title” default answer “Family Videos” buttons {“Cancel”, “Ok”} default button 2
set theYear to year of (current date) as integer
tell application “iTunes”
copy selection to tracklist
repeat with theTrack in tracklist
set show of theTrack to text returned of showTitle
set season number of theTrack to theYear
set video kind of theTrack to TV show
end repeat
end tell
To use that, just select some movies in iTunes and run the script. Whatever’s selected will be tagged and grouped under the title you entered.
Now our home movies are all grouped together and easily synced to iPhones or other iTunes fed products like iPods and Apple TVs. To view videos on any of those devices, the movies will need to be converted to iPod compatible format. QuickTime can do it, but iSquint/VisualHub can do it much faster.
This could have been done with AtomicParsley, but AppleScript is easier and pre-installed on every Mac.
What would be really great is if iTunes and iPhoto could talk to one another and pull video content out. iPhoto has supported movies for years now, why can’t they talk to each other? (because neither was designed for handling video formats?)
There’s plenty of room to improve this, if you do please post a link in the comments.
