Find movies without ac3 tracks in iTunes.

[Lilscoy22]

Hello,

I was wondering if there was a quick way to make a smart playlist or something to sort all movies without ac3 tracks within iTunes. I have ripped hundreds of my dvds over the past year, and at first I was not including a second soundtrack with ac3 pass-thru surround. Well, I changed my mind about halfway through, and started including two tracks, stereo and ac3 pass-thru. I want to go back sometime and re-encode my dvds without ac3 tracks so I can include them this time. The problem is, I went in kind of a random order when selecting dvds to rip, and I forgot which movies don't have an ac3 track. I was hoping there was something similar to Doug's scripts for music to find all movies with only aac tracks. I know this sounds kind of lazy, and I can just check each one. But I was just curious if there was a quick and easy way to do this.

Thanks!

-Lilscoy

 

[mac.jedi]

Hi Lilscoy!

I remember doing something like this a while back. I don't think I was able to find an easy way to do it in iTunes, but I did find a couple other ways to do it.

Assuming you're on a Mac, the first technique uses Finder's Smart Folders. In the Finder, I navigated to my iTunes Media folder and selected my Movies folder. I set up the smart folder to target the Movies folder and had the Spotlight filter set to something like: Audio channels is greater than 2.

The second technique uses a script and a tool bundled with Batch Rip Actions for Automator, a set of actions I wrote for tagging and encoding. The thread for this is located at the top of this forum. Anyway, the script looks at each file in my movie folder and creates a tab-delimited text file of every movie listing the movie name, whether it's HD or SD, and whether it's AAC stereo or AC3 5.1. From this, I can open the file in Numbers and sort/filter anyway I like. For example I could only have it show movies that are SD/AAC or HD/AC3.

I'm on my iPhone right now, so if your interested in either of these let me know and I'll dig a bit deeper when I'm back on a Mac.

Thanks!

mac.jedi

 

[Lilscoy22]

Thanks!

Hey mac.jedi,

Thanks for replying! Both of those options sound good! I'll definitely give the smart folders thing a try and see if that works. I never thought of using that. Hopefully that will at least get me started. That automator script sounds really great! I woud actually love to have a spreadsheet showing all of my movies with their technical info. I can see a lot of possibilities with that, especially the SD/HD thing along with the soundtracks.

Anyway, thanks for your help!

-Lilscoy