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iTunes damaging video files

T

thatsmyfish

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 20, 2009
339
100
Hi all,

Hoping someone can offer an explanation and a solution. I use a Mac Mini home theater, and have backed up all my DVDs to external drives and use eyeTV/iTunes for all content - meaning I have thousands of TV episodes, movies, etc...aliased into iTunes.

Most recently, I'll add a video file to an external drive and alias it into iTunes. When I use iTunes to change the name of the TV show, add artwork, etc...I'll get the rainbow ball for a few seconds. At times, it gets to the point where I have to quit iTunes. Once I do that, the video file is unwatchable. The icon turns green, and when you attempt to watch it anywhere from a few minutes to almost the entire thing is all green and garbled. It's to the point where I have to make a backup of the file before I try and modify it.

Also, I added a 12 gig file to iTunes over the weekend - the first I think that large, and the video playback was slower than the audio playback in iTunes. People walked in slow motion, but the audio was fine, so things got worse and worse the longer it went. In Quicktime there was no issue. Only when my computer was performing multiple tasks could I replicate the issue in Quicktime.

Is this a sign that my iTunes library has grown too large? Is there anything I can do to fix this?

Thanks very much!
 
P

peterjcat

macrumors 6502
Jun 14, 2010
457
1
ryanpfw said:
Most recently, I'll add a video file to an external drive and alias it into iTunes. When I use iTunes to change the name of the TV show, add artwork, etc...I'll get the rainbow ball for a few seconds. At times, it gets to the point where I have to quit iTunes. Once I do that, the video file is unwatchable. The icon turns green, and when you attempt to watch it anywhere from a few minutes to almost the entire thing is all green and garbled. It's to the point where I have to make a backup of the file before I try and modify it.
Click to expand...

I'd recommend using an external tagger instead of iTunes to change metadata. iTunes insists on rewriting the entire file every time it makes a serious change to it, and it freezes until the file is rewritten. If you're on an external drive, this will be either a bit or a lot slower than writing to the internal drive. If you force-quit iTunes while it's writing, you'll often get an unplayable file.

By contrast, all metadata can be changed by an external tagger like Subler, iFlicks, iDentify 2 etc, without rewriting the whole file unless you want to (which can be handy for streaming but doesn't seem to make much difference to me). If you do want to keep tagging with iTunes, you have to be super patient and resist the temptation to quit out of it!
 
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