How Organized Are Your Movies? - Screenshots!

kjr39 said:

I noticed that some of you guys have HD rips? How are you ripping and converting from an HD-DVD/Blu-ray disk?

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I for one have found a great source for downloading 720p (and even some 1080p) .mkv files of feature length films (only ones I own already of course). So, no ripping necessary on my end. Many people make these available on the internet (not the Web, mind you). There is a slight learning curve, but this method of internet file transfer pre-dates the World Wide Web by at least a decade or more. A little digging and I'm sure what yoU SeEk caN bE obTained.

I know its not in the same league as the others on here but i am currently working on tagging everything. The biggest thing holding me back is the lack of hard drive space at the moment, can anyone recommend me an external hard drive around 500Gb and is it worth paying extra for a firewire connection or is USB going to be fine?
Cheers Rob.

some people are firewire nutz but I find that USB2 is just fine. I have a 500gb MyBook essential edition and use it for all of the audio in iTunes. It works just fine. I also have a 250gb MyBook plugged in USB2 for my TV shows in iTunes and again have no speed problems. Never have any problems streaming to the aTV either. Some will tell you that you have to have FW800 or nothing else and that simply is just a BS.

Great thread guys, I've just updating my movies and it's 50 times better now!

Within movies I have about 30 adverts and about 50 personal short camera clips taken from holidays. Is there a way to move these into a separate list so they no longer show in Movies or is it just purely the other 2 options of TV Show or Music Video?

What is the best method of ripping a TV Show DVD?

For example 1 disc has 8 episodes and I would like them appear individually rather than just 1 file under TV Shows in Itunes. Would I have to rip each episode individually?

Thanks

Darren

Is it possible to use a large external for movies and tv shows but keep all my music on my internal? When i open itunes would it still all be there at the same time or would i have to change settings each time i want to see a movie to get it off the external?
im not sure if this makes sense, hope someone understands..

thanks

jensepollense said:

Is it possible to use a large external for movies and tv shows but keep all my music on my internal? When i open itunes would it still all be there at the same time or would i have to change settings each time i want to see a movie to get it off the external?
im not sure if this makes sense, hope someone understands..

thanks

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Sure,

If you hold down the option key while dragging in your movie, iTunes won't copy it internally but refer to the original location.

Kevin

HELP
I have been tagging with MetaX today and all has been ok apart from one. I tagged a 720P movie which i had already watched and when i added it to iTunes and try to play it back all i get is a black screen and a really loud buzzing sound.
Has any one else found this and got a fix for me? please!

Here is my collection, I have used MetaX on some files before but have been a a bit cautious since I lost some films and also some of the weird itunes reactions to the films. Now I just use a Apple Script from Doug's Itunes Scripts for the Description

Ahh, I'm a little confused on the USENET thing... anyone wanna give me a clue on how to get HD movies. And also, what settings do you guys use to rip/convert? I want to start a movie collection so thanks for the help!

xJus10x said:

Ahh, I'm a little confused on the USENET thing... anyone wanna give me a clue on how to get HD movies. And also, what settings do you guys use to rip/convert? I want to start a movie collection so thanks for the help!

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I use HandBrake, and/or Visual Hub. I like them both, but Handbrake has presets for different devices. Most of the movies I convert are for Apple TV, so everything is always perfect.

VisualHub works very nicely too. I guess the only part I hate is that both programs decode the dvd at about 1.5X, so the time is just under the actual film length. I just put it in another space, and keep on doing what I want to do.

can anyone give me some help converting mkv files to mp4 via visual hub - whats the best settings for keeping the conversion as close to the original as possible?

OP, billabong, can i just ask what bitrate youve encoded your movies at??

.mark. said:

can anyone give me some help converting mkv files to mp4 via visual hub - whats the best settings for keeping the conversion as close to the original as possible?

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The settings I use are... AppleTV, "Go Nuts"

Then under advanced, I constrain the file size to 4290 MB. This will yield a final size just under the magical 4 gigs, which keeps iTunes happy. Typical DVD rips never get that large (except for extra long movies like LOTR), but the hi-def mkvs look better for me when I make them as large as possible while still allowing tagging in iTunes (you can't add artwork to files larger than 4GB). Sometimes under audio, I specify a bitrate of 160, and manually choose "stereo," simply because those are the published limitations of tv.

If your main concern is picture quality, check the two-pass option. I never choose it, but keep in mind this obviously doubles the encode time.

Nightline said:

I use HandBrake, and/or Visual Hub. I like them both, but Handbrake has presets for different devices. Most of the movies I convert are for Apple TV, so everything is always perfect.

VisualHub works very nicely too. I guess the only part I hate is that both programs decode the dvd at about 1.5X, so the time is just under the actual film length. I just put it in another space, and keep on doing what I want to do.

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Get an external firewire DVD drive. It goes much faster than most internal drives. Decoding (not compressing) full disk generally takes no longer than 10 minutes.

Consultant said:

Get an external firewire DVD drive. It goes much faster than most internal drives. Decoding (not compressing) full disk generally takes no longer than 10 minutes.

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visual hub can do that??

or are u talking MTR3?

DoFoT9 said:

visual hub can do that??

or are u talking MTR3?

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I believe he is simply stating that using an external DVD drive will result in a much faster copy to the hard drive. It won't speed up the actual encode.

NightStorm said:

I believe he is simply stating that using an external DVD drive will result in a much faster copy to the hard drive. It won't speed up the actual encode.

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yea he said decoding. which i presume means taking away the ACCROSS encodings and what not and copying it to a storage device.(i think)

I have none. I also live in Canada. I should start to rip some.

I actually don't have an appletv, I use my MacMini hooked up to my 50" plasma running Leopard's Front Row. I hate how I have to convert my movies to mp4 in order to be used in iTunes, and I refuse to do it except for my iPhone movie files. I'm a stickler for video quality and don't want to compress something that was already compressed. I basically have all my movies on an external drive and have folders called "Movies", "TV Shows", "Music Videos", and "Other". I put aliases for these in my home "movies" folder and access it through Front Row or just through the Finder, which i end up doing 90% of the time.

For the finder I set it up in icon view with a black background. Then I find the artwork online and convert it to an icon, then apply it to the movie file. It's not quite as slick as a remote interface but I use my macmini for web/photo browsing all the time anyway, not a big deal with a wireless keyboard and mouse. It's also nice to just see all your movies all at once, and looks pretty impressive. The other thing is that Quicktime with Perian installed doesn't work smoothly with MKV files, I need to open them with VLC.

EDIT: just wanted to add that another advantage to having the macmini is that I use it as a main media basestation and for torrent downloads. My other computer is a MacBook so it's nice to have a dedicated machine for downloads and one iTunes library that is always on and that I can access at any time.

Hi all
Although i have lost a file with MetaX i am quite happy with what the app can do and would reccommend it i will post some pics with all my stuff now tagged in a couple of days.

Just a quick question as well if i may just got Matrix in 720P but it has subtitles is there any way to remove them from the MP4 file?
Cheers Rob

Rob1980 said:

Hi all
Although i have lost a file with MetaX i am quite happy with what the app can do and would reccommend it i will post some pics with all my stuff now tagged in a couple of days.

Just a quick question as well if i may just got Matrix in 720P but it has subtitles is there any way to remove them from the MP4 file?
Cheers Rob

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try seeing if the file is in quicktime, wen u open the movie just go to "window">"show movie propterties" and see if its in there

DoFoT9 said:

try seeing if the file is in quicktime, wen u open the movie just go to "window">"show movie propterties" and see if its in there

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Thanks for the tip i had a quick look and could not see anything obvious in movie properties. Really bugging me now lol

What an incredible "labor of love" catalogs you guys have!

Rob1980 said:

Thanks for the tip i had a quick look and could not see anything obvious in movie properties. Really bugging me now lol

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oh ok. for subtitles there would normally be 3 types of files, one audio, one movie and then the subtiles.

if thers only 2 then id say that the subtitles ahve been integrated into the movie.. would be extremely hard if not imopssible to get rid of them then

imlucid said:

Sure,

If you hold down the option key while dragging in your movie, iTunes won't copy it internally but refer to the original location.

Kevin

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Now this is bloody useful.