iPod Changing from 'Movie' or 'Music Video' to 'TV Show'

In iTunes, Get Info and change the genre to TV Shows. If this field is blank then it probably defaults to Movies on your iPod.

Well, I develop the program, so I can help you.

Open up the folder that AtomicParsley is in. You will see a dark charcoal gray icon for it. Don't do anything yet other than just having it visible.

Open up the folder that your m4v is in. iTunes prefers the "m4v" extension to "mp4".

Open Terminal.app. It is in your /Applications/Utilities folder. A plain naked window will open up with the last thing being a dollar sign or percent sign ($, %).

Now, in the Finder, drag & drop the AtomicParsley icon onto the Terminal.app window. The path (the location of the file) will automatically appear in Terminal.app. A trailing space will be appended (which is perfect).

Now, do the same with your m4v file. Drag and drop it onto Terminal.app.

Then copy this command and paste it into the Terminal.app window:



You should have something like this:


hit return, and a new file will show up next to it (if it works). The genre is what shows up in iTunes, but the stik atom (and I don't know that it stands for) defines what shows up in iTunes->GetInfo->Options->VideoKind.

your other stik atom options are: "Movie", "Whacked Bookmark", "Music Video", "TV Show" - Movie is default I believe, so you don't need to explicity state it.

BornAgainMac said:

In iTunes, Get Info and change the genre to TV Shows. If this field is blank then it probably defaults to Movies on your iPod.

Click to expand...

If you get info on the video file in iTunes 6, you can change it between Movie and Music Video, but nothing else. This option is also seperate from the genre.

I guess apple decided not to give options for videos they considered you would only be downloading. It is odd though. My advice, create a video playlist, name the genre TV Show or use one of iTunes multiple other features to help you find them easier after synching.

steve_hill4 said:

If you get info on the video file in iTunes 6, you can change it between Movie and Music Video, but nothing else. This option is also seperate from the genre.

Click to expand...

You'll find that if you quit and restart iTunes or delete-and-readd it to your library, that isn't the case. It's apparently a read-only tag to iTunes.

Edit:

darwen: I made up this little primer for those that might be unfamiliar with Terminal.app and how to invoke AtomicParsley. It will get folded into the next release of AtomicParsley.

Edit2:
...and here is the link:
http://members.verizon.net/pucklock/AP_Primer.zip

Oddly, this video/tv stuff is really ancillary to why I started on this program - which was to set & extract multiple pieces of artwork in m4a files for my tagging program called ID Infiltr8:

http://members.verizon.net/pucklock/id3Infiltr8/IDInfiltr8.html

I only added these video/tv tags because they were relatively easy to implement (most tags took about 6 lines to code). ID Infiltr8 will be the GUI to setting tags in audio files, and AtomicParsley will stay a general-purpose command line tool for setting any tags I can figure out.

Thanks for the generous offer of space, but the sourceforge site lets me put up pages. I just recently put it up (after being forced into reading the site documentation on how to do it - there were command-line tools involved, but not as bad as I thought it would be):

http://atomicparsley.sourceforge.net/

anaxamander said:

your other stik atom options are: "Movie", "Whacked Bookmark", "Music Video", "TV Show" - Movie is default I believe, so you don't need to explicity state it.

Click to expand...

anaxamander, if the TV Show value for the stik atom is 0x0A, what is the value for Music Video? I'd like to burn some home-brewed music videos to a disc and would like for their video type to default "Music Video" in iTunes.

darwen:
Alright, first, see if this version helps first. If I'm right, AtomicParsley thought your tree had more atoms after the "mdat" atom at the end. Here:

http://members.verizon.net/pucklock/AtomicParsley0.7.5.zip EDIT: A newer version can be found below

otherwise.... there must have been an error in the atom hierarchy reading it in. If you want, you can file a bug report (at the atomicparsley site anywhere). I'll need the "atomicParsley /path/to/yourfile.mp4 -T" printout. You can obsure the filename; it will only be atom names, lengths & the layout. On the source & output file too if possible.

And if you know, what tool was used to encode the file would help too (probably).

ignus:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs....arsley/AtomicParsley.cpp?rev=1.10&view=markup
line 1330:
0x06

Sounds good, but one question: where can I get it?

Oh, one more thing, is it windows or mac?

ToastMaster said:

Oh, one more thing, is it windows or mac?

Click to expand...

Mac only. But it probably can be ported with some effort.

anaxamander said:

ignus:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs....arsley/AtomicParsley.cpp?rev=1.10&view=markup
line 1330:
0x06

Click to expand...

Perfect. Thank you so much!

When I follow the procedure mentioned above, I get a new file. When I add it to iTunes it is still a movie and it is still not able to be changed.

Any idea why?

Mac only? Bummer. I'll have to hunt around and see if there's another program for Windows that does a similar task.

ToastMaster said:

Mac only? Bummer. I'll have to hunt around and see if there's another program for Windows that does a similar task.

Click to expand...

Now that the tags are known. (Yay!) it should be straightforward to modify something like this Perl code to be cross platform, i.e. Linux, Mac, Windows.

B

punk,
[that's just funny] Yes. Apparently, AtomicParsley has a problem with adding things at the last posiiton. If a movie file was encoded with ffmpeg (but oddly enough not with ffmpeg-based Handbrake), the mpeg4 file recommendations were... taken into consideration (and then ignored). Consequently, the mdat atom is before the moov atom, and AtomicParsley only adds into the moov.udta hierarchy - which is now at the end. Also, iTunes requires the moov.udta.meta.hdlr atom present, or it will be unmodifiable, and that isn't being added as well.

balamw,
I have emailed the author of Audio::M4P a few times to tell him of new atoms I've come across (haven't gotten around to the video atoms I don't think). As I recall, he did mention something about looking into video.... And I see it's up to 0.16 since last I looked.

So if everyone else is getting this to work, what are they using to encode instead of handbrake?

Also, If I encode in MP4 what is the max resolution that I can encode at that will still play on the iPod?

I'm currently putting my video library on iTunes in preparation for when iPods with bigger hard drives come out. So as of right now I can't test the videos I've already made to see if they'll play back appropriately on the iPod.

anaxamander said:

I have emailed the author of Audio::M4P a few times

Click to expand...

Excellent! I'm really looking forward to playing with AtomicParsley this weekend!

B

Is this looking like it is only going to be possible with the MPEG4 container?

My situation is, I download a number of Japanese television shows that we'll never, ever get here. (Variety shows, drama, etc.) Most of that stuff is DivX or whatnot, but I found that I could easily add them to iTunes by opening them in QuickTime and saving a reference movie for them. Drag that reference movie, instead of the original file, to iTunes, and not only can I add files that normally wouldn't be addable to iTunes, but the reference movie also plays nice when it comes to setting the frame and whatnot.

The problem, of course, is that I still can't use this solution to get those reference movies marked as TV Shows.

Is this going to be possible at all with a QuickTime .mov container, or are these options only present in MPEG4 containers?

Alright, for the ffmpeg video problems, try this:

http://members.verizon.net/pucklock/AtomicParsley-0.7.5a.zip

----------
shidoshi,

Since Apple is providing their TV Shows in an mpeg4 container, I doubt they would bother to support anything else. With the exception of some podcasts, everything is mpeg4 based now. Besides, Apple doesn't in any way support avi - it's left to 3rd party extensions. If Apple does support it in any other containers, someone would need need to a) understand that container and b) find where Apple added the new tags. But I doubt Apple would: their digital rights management software is based on mpeg4. I doubt Apple would be giving away copyrighted TV shows for free.

As I recall, there is a way to use gpac's mp4box command line program to copy the audio & video tracks out of *some*, maybe lots of avi's (depeding on how they were encoded) into an mpeg4 container without transcoding. It's really dependent on how they were encoded.

Still, if you can get them into an mpeg4 container, good news: I got an email from a japanese user that AtomicParsely can set even japanese text tags on the command line. Not being fluent in Japanese, I can't verify anything. Frankly, I'm surprised because I know I didn't specifically code for.... whatever unicode standard that is in.

Wonderful!

I have had great sucess tonight with AtomicParsley version 0.7.5a on videos encoded with both handbrake's ffmpeg and isquint. Great work on the code changes!

anaxamander said:

Since Apple is providing their TV Shows in an mpeg4 container, I doubt they would bother to support anything else. With the exception of some podcasts, everything is mpeg4 based now. Besides, Apple doesn't in any way support avi - it's left to 3rd party extensions.

Click to expand...

Let me try to re-explain what I'm doing.

I open the .avi or whatever video file I have that won't usually import into iTunes (but that CAN play in QuickTime Player via added codecs), and save out a .mov reference movie. Basically, it is a very small file that links back to the main video file. I then drag that reference movie into iTunes, and use that to get iTunes to access my "unblessed" video files.

This has two benefits. First, I don't have to copy the large video file into my iTunes "Music" folder when I have iTunes set to automatically keep things organized - it just copies over the small reference movie. Second, since the file going into iTunes is a .mov file, iTunes officially supports it, and I get added benefits like being able to set the poster frame, where with some files and codecs that isn't an option.

So I'm not asking for support for these tags with an .avi, I'm asking for support of these tags via the reference movie, which is a QuickTime .mov file. I wouldn't doubt that Apple only has iTunes set up to be able to read these kinds of tags from MPEG4 files, but I figured it might be possible also with a .mov file.