iTunes and Video

I’ve recently started watching video on my iPod Touch while exercising on our elliptical machine. I place the iPod on the book holder, plug in headphones, and off I go.

I had been watching TV or movies on the TV near the elliptical, but the whole view is blocked by a post, and I had to turn the volume way up to be able to hear it over the movement, and distance. There’s also the problem of either stopping or calling someone to change DVDs for me as the TV shows would sometimes span DVDs during my workout.

My workouts are 45 minutes in length, normally I can fit in an hour long episode (wonderful without the commercials), 2 half hour episodes, or an episode of diggnation.

Recently I’ve been converting Futurama episodes for the iPod, and loading them into iTunes. I’ve run into a couple of speed bumps.

First, iTunes doesn’t like adding 22 episodes of video at a time. While my system and network are no where near taxed, iTunes slows to a crawl. 5 to 6 episodes at a time it handles no problem.

Second, while iTunes 7 has added features for video specifics, it still expects the audio track name and number filled out for display. This means updating information in 2 different tabs in iTunes. I had started entering this information manually, but today I grew tired of copying and pasting and started looking for an easier method.

As always, looking for an easier method with iTunes starts with Doug’s AppleScripts where I found this script, that’ll allow me to update multiple video tracks at one time, something iTunes doesn’t do.

Now this only gets me part way there, but my job is much easier. I still need to edit the Episode ID with the name. There’s no way around doing this manual, so I just did it.

This still didn’t put the name of the episode into the iTunes TV Shows list though. For that, the information needed to be copied from the Video tab to the Info tab. I wrote this quick and dirty AppleScript to help with that:

tell application "iTunes"
    set sel to selection
    repeat with i from 1 to (count sel)
        set t to item i of sel
        tell t
            set album to show as string
            set disc number to season number as number
            set track number to episode number as number
            set name to episode ID as string
            set genre to video kind as string
        end tell
    end repeat
end tell

The time to process new shows in iTunes has now dramatically decreased.

Third, smart playlists and the Video Kind setting don’t allow me to exclude any video from a smart playlist. I keep a smart playlist of all recently added tracks, this allows me to easily see what has been recently added, but also because my music is stored on a NAS, I can use some simple AppleScript to automatically add recent tracks to other Macs throughout the house. To get around this, I ended up using the genre to specify the video kind and filter based on it. The script above handles setting the genre to video kind for me.

Those are the issues I’ve found with iTunes, so far, and how I managed to work around them.