How Organized Are Your Movies? - Screenshots!

[northy124]

Kind of ashamed to post this as there is like 8 films in total I have been re-doing my library as I lost most of it from the PC, with iCloud I am hoping that I can get my films back when they allow Films to be downloaded like they have with TV

Anyway used HandBrake to encode, Subler to tag and iTunes to organise (obviously ).

 

[MultiBat]

Kind of ashamed to post this as there is like 8 films in total I have been re-doing my library as I lost most of it from the PC, with iCloud I am hoping that I can get my films back when they allow Films to be downloaded like they have with TV

Anyway used HandBrake to encode, Subler to tag and iTunes to organise (obviously ).

Image

I also use Handbrake and the subler to tag (after first having ripped my DVD with ripit).

But the main reason I wanted to respond to you post is to say that you need not be ashamed of it only being 8 movies. Not when one of them is Groundhog Day!

That is one great movie!

 

[dlegend]

Working on tagging the TV shows now. Hoping to get another big batch done over Christmas.

 

[Mr. McMac]

Mine

 

[Darien Red Sox]

Always keep min tagged with artwork and make sure it gets done as soon as I load the movie. When it comes files computers that is one of the few areas (the other being tools) that I insist on being super organized. A messy desk around the computer doesn't bother me (I am not an neat and clean kind of guy) but one file out of place drives me crazy.

 

[morningsong]

How are y'all changing the background color in the thumbnail view?
I have a white BG and can't find any where to change the setting.
thanks!

 

[northy124]

How are y'all changing the background color in the thumbnail view?
I have a white BG and can't find any where to change the setting.
thanks!

Pref > Grid View > Scroll Menu > Select Colour.

My new updated library only added like 8 films but still

 

[From A Buick 8]

Mine so far.

 

[morningsong]

Thanks northy!!!!

Eclectic collection you have there...I couldn't tie all those flicks together if you paid me!

 

[jeffburk]

Sorry to bump this old thread, but it's a good thread, and it's relevant to something I've been researching here and on the Web and can't find many suggestions on: how to organize TV shows.

I've used the automator scripts generously shared by Mac.Jedi to rip, encode and tag several hundred movies and a couple of thousand TV episodes. I watch them almost exclusively on the ATV2.

Figuring out what to do with movies released in theaters and regular TV series is easy. But I have a lot of DVDs and Blu-Rays that do not neatly fit into one category or another. Many of them are documentaries from PBS, BBC, Food Network, History Channel, Discover, etc. Some of them are in series or mini-series. Others are one-off specials.

For example, what do you do with a TV documentary that consists of only one episode and is not part of a larger series? A lot of times those are found at the themoviedb.org rather than thetvdb.com. I have generally listed these as TV shows, making them episode 1, season 1 with the show name and episode name having the same value. This means that a single episode gets a whole show and season to itself.

Some of these have been set up on thetvdb.com as a series such as "History Channel Documentaries," into which all the one-off specials are grouped. This solution works OK, although it seems a bit artificial to treat all these documentaries as being a single series.

Or how about a DVD of selected episodes from different seasons for a TV show for which most episodes are not available? For example, the Food Network tends to put out compilations of episodes for its chefs that are organized by subject matter (entrees, desserts, etc.) and not season. If you organize them by season and episode, you might get four seasons showing for a collection of just six episodes. I have just organized these by leaving the season and episode numbers blank, so that they are alphabetical.

Particularly given that Apple has never gotten around to restoring the nesting of seasons under a TV show on the ATV, it takes scrolling through hundreds of listings to find something. (This has been made even more fun since the iTunes 10.6 update has screwed up the order, but I assume they will fix that in the next update.)

What about made-for-TV movies? Do you put them in movies or TV shows? I put them under movies.

By the way, what is the benefit of filling in the artist, album artist, album, track number, dvd number and episode ID fields for purposes of viewing movies and TV shows on the ATV2? I have all this metadata filled in, but I cannot figure out whether it makes a difference.

I know there are plenty of work-arounds for these issues (such as playlists), but I am curious how others with large movie and TV show collections organize their media. Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Dhelsdon]

Thanks for bumping this, I too found it to be super-useful. Those are some good questions, I guess it come down to personal preference as to where you'd feel most comfortable looking for them.

Luckily for me I haven't ran into the situation that you're in, I just have regular TV shows and movies. Once my ATV arrives I'll begin organizing my media a bit better.

I am still a bit unsure as to how exactly to go about it though, since I use a second media box, the WD TV Live. I'll have a lot of conversions to do if the jailbreak doesn't come out for awhile.

 

[x-evil-x]

heres mine nbd 324 movies in there

 

[x-evil-x]

and yes all my covers are front and back art from the dvd covers. The only ones that are different are digital copies that have all the info on them.

 

[slothrob]

By the way, what is the benefit of filling in the artist, album artist, album, track number, dvd number and episode ID fields for purposes of viewing movies and TV shows on the ATV2? I have all this metadata filled in, but I cannot figure out whether it makes a difference.

The only one of those I have found useful for video is the track number, which will number your episodes in iTunes, which can come in handy occasionally.

 

[obsidian1200]

Sorry to bump this old thread, but it's a good thread, and it's relevant to something I've been researching here and on the Web and can't find many suggestions on: how to organize TV shows.

I've used the automator scripts generously shared by Mac.Jedi to rip, encode and tag several hundred movies and a couple of thousand TV episodes. I watch them almost exclusively on the ATV2.

Figuring out what to do with movies released in theaters and regular TV series is easy. But I have a lot of DVDs and Blu-Rays that do not neatly fit into one category or another. Many of them are documentaries from PBS, BBC, Food Network, History Channel, Discover, etc. Some of them are in series or mini-series. Others are one-off specials.

For example, what do you do with a TV documentary that consists of only one episode and is not part of a larger series? A lot of times those are found at the themoviedb.org rather than thetvdb.com. I have generally listed these as TV shows, making them episode 1, season 1 with the show name and episode name having the same value. This means that a single episode gets a whole show and season to itself.

Some of these have been set up on thetvdb.com as a series such as "History Channel Documentaries," into which all the one-off specials are grouped. This solution works OK, although it seems a bit artificial to treat all these documentaries as being a single series.

Definitely an issue of personal preference with this (then again, tagging your content really does come down to this anyway). I personally categorize them as movies, just like I do with other Made-For-TV movies.

Or how about a DVD of selected episodes from different seasons for a TV show for which most episodes are not available? For example, the Food Network tends to put out compilations of episodes for its chefs that are organized by subject matter (entrees, desserts, etc.) and not season. If you organize them by season and episode, you might get four seasons showing for a collection of just six episodes. I have just organized these by leaving the season and episode numbers blank, so that they are alphabetical.

For automated tagging purposes, I use the order that the episodes appear as on the metadata sites. Then, once I have the basic info, like summaries, ratings and whatnot, I open the files in Subler and edit the show field to the name of the DVD (example, Food Network: Deserts Collection or what have you) and reorder the episodes as they appear on the DVD if necessary. This way, in iTunes, the episodes do appear under one category. The only time I wouldn't do this is if you own the rest of the series in question, then I'd just leave them as is.

What about made-for-TV movies? Do you put them in movies or TV shows? I put them under movies.

Same here, no sense in adding more unneeded scrolling to the TV shows menus haha.

By the way, what is the benefit of filling in the artist, album artist, album, track number, dvd number and episode ID fields for purposes of viewing movies and TV shows on the ATV2? I have all this metadata filled in, but I cannot figure out whether it makes a difference.

I know there are plenty of work-arounds for these issues (such as playlists), but I am curious how others with large movie and TV show collections organize their media. Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

The only fields that I think make a difference are the track # and disc #, to be honest. I personally prefer to have the other fields filled in, though, since I'm a bit of an organizational nut.

I'd like to note that using playlists has made things much easier for me. It makes more sense to have an ordered playlist for film franchises that don't have conventional numbering schemes (such as the Godzilla films) than searching through a list of movies for films you know you don't want to watch at the given time. Also, I tend to do the same for tv shows that have more than 50 episodes/3 seasons, which ever comes first. I wish I didn't have to, but the lackluster sorting functions on the apple TV kind of force my hand there. Plus, in the case of TV shows, playlists let you easily watch episodes back to back without getting sent back to the menu at the end of each episode.

 

[atandon]

home movies

Folks,
How do u organize your home movies (shot off camcorders). I have a ton of videos that I would like to arrange by year, month, etc

Would have been nice if we had album support with iTunes and apple tv. Closest thing i could find is playlists

The way I have it organized right now

[home movies] <- playlist folder
|
|-> [2008] <- playlist folder
| |
| |-> summer playlist
| |-> winter playlist
| :
| :
|
|-> [2012]

One problem with this is that I end up "mixing" my home videos with my movie collection (hollywood stuff).
Other option is to classify my home videos as TV shows and use the season tag to classify the videos year wise. Only issue with this is that every video for a given season gets the same thumbnail

Any recommendations?

 

[ayzee]

Folks,
How do u organize your home movies (shot off camcorders). I have a ton of videos that I would like to arrange by year, month, etc

Would have been nice if we had album support with iTunes and apple tv. Closest thing i could find is playlists

The way I have it organized right now

[home movies] <- playlist folder
|
|-> [2008] <- playlist folder
| |
| |-> summer playlist
| |-> winter playlist
| :
| :
|
|-> [2012]

One problem with this is that I end up "mixing" my home videos with my movie collection (hollywood stuff).
Other option is to classify my home videos as TV shows and use the season tag to classify the videos year wise. Only issue with this is that every video for a given season gets the same thumbnail

Any recommendations?

Tag them as a tv show e.g home videos. Use a tagging application like identify, and u will be able to add the full date to the video by tagging the release date e.g 2011-04-04

You can then sort by release date in iTunes and voila! Home video organisation!

 

[Dizzle88]

This is mine I am incredibly OCD about this kind of thing.

 

[khollister]

372 blu-ray's, transcoded with Handbrake, tagged with Subler

 

[urkel]

How are people handling multiple formats of the same movie?

For years I've converted my DVDs to an iTunes compatible file but only recently started with BluRay. This created a huge organizational annoyance because now I've got multiple versions of the same film:
- Old DVD rips (which I'll gradually update to HD if I ever buy the BluRay)
- New BR Rips
- iTunes Digital Copy (The ones that come with your Movie that CAN'T be streamed?!?!)
- Low Quality Rips (We use an old 16GB iPad as our car movie player)

So what does everyone do when theyve got multiple versions? Tag it like "Toy Story 3 (1080p)" and "Toy Story 3 (Digital Copy)"? Or is there some sort of hidden field that can help me classify these better,

 

[rayward]

How are people handling multiple formats of the same movie?

For years I've converted my DVDs to an iTunes compatible file but only recently started with BluRay. This created a huge organizational annoyance because now I've got multiple versions of the same film:
- Old DVD rips (which I'll gradually update to HD if I ever buy the BluRay)
- New BR Rips
- iTunes Digital Copy (The ones that come with your Movie that CAN'T be streamed?!?!)
- Low Quality Rips (We use an old 16GB iPad as our car movie player)

So what does everyone do when theyve got multiple versions? Tag it like "Toy Story 3 (1080p)" and "Toy Story 3 (Digital Copy)"? Or is there some sort of hidden field that can help me classify these better,

I have only just recently upgraded to ATV3, so I now have a very mixed set of hardware for which I need various levels of resolution. What I had been doing is as follows as follows:

- For DVDs: 1 version at 480p for all hardware
- For BDs: 1 version at 544p for iDevices and 1 at 720p for ATV.

For BDs, I would name the 720p file as the movie title, and append "iP" to the title for the lower resolution version. I use Subler to tag the 720p file, and add the Apple Content ID to both versions. I then drag the 720p file to iTunes first and then the "iP" file second.

What I didn't know, but am very happy about, is that iTunes would automatically rename the files adding "(HD)" to the 720p file and deleting the "iP" from the 544p file. I never saw this because the Content ID means both versions have one entry in the library.

So...now that I have added ATV3 to the mix, I am starting to make a 3rd version at 1080p. After tagging with Subler as above, remembering to set the 1080p tag, I simply drag the file to iTunes and it puts it into the same library entry and renames it with "(1080p HD)". iTunes sends to 1080p version to my ATV3, the 720p version to my old ATVs and syncs the 544p version to my iDevices.

I am very happy with how simple this process is.

 

[DP812]

Saw this and wanted to add mine.

I've wanted to convert my movie library to digital formats for some time (and keep the discs as back-ups). Since I've got a few hundred movies, having them in a way where they can be easily flipped through like on a shelf takes up a lot of space (and when you live in Japan, space quickly becomes an issue). Keeping the discs all in spindles saves a lot of space, but makes it a pain to find what you want to watch.

Apple TV seemed like a good solution since iTunes gives me the versatility I want. It's not without its share of problems, but it works for me.

I used MacDVD Ripper Pro to copy the movie files to my computer, converted them with Handbrake, and then put them in iFlicks for tagging, which then directly imports the tagged videos into iTunes (I tried MetaX, but found I preferred iFlicks). There are lots of times when I don't like the cover art iFlicks chooses, but it's a simple matter of either getting it from themoviedb.org or, if I can't find anything I like (I have a tendency to be a bit picky about things like this for some reason), then I'll scour the web for images I like and put together my own artwork in Photoshop.

It works great with the Apple TV 3, my only real complaint is ATV ONLY having the option of Front Row display for home sharing. Why ATV doesn't offer the same versatility as iTunes is just mind-boggling. I'm hoping an ATV3 jailbreak will come out soon that will let me change this to something more visually appealing (not to mention easier to scroll through).

 

[heisenberg123]

It works great with the Apple TV 3, my only real complaint is ATV ONLY having the option of Front Row display for home sharing. Why ATV doesn't offer the same versatility as iTunes is just mind-boggling. I'm hoping an ATV3 jailbreak will come out soon that will let me change this to something more visually appealing (not to mention easier to scroll through).

totally agree I hope they offer more views for how your list of movies appear

 

[itsjared]

Here's mine for both Movies and TV Shows.

In movies, I use the genre to denote the type of media, i.e. Blu-Ray or DVD.

Anyway, I was curious to see where most people get their album art from? For Movies I pull out of IMDB and use firebug to isolate the URL for the image. Then I pull directly from their art servers.

In TV Shows, I use the genre to denote the channel of the show, i.e. ABC, or Fox or HBO.

I use the same technique with TV SHOWS as well, except I try to find them on Apple's Website. Usually a search for "Dexter iTunes" will pull up Apple's iTunes page and there is the image. Albeit, it's only 175x175. So when I copy the URL it looks like this:

http://a5.mzstatic.com/us/r1000/096/Video/17/af/31/mzl.jmfltjhx.170x170-75.jpg

at that point you simply remove the "170x170-75." and BAMM!! you've got a beautiful 600x600 Official iTunes Artwork! Still need to find artwork for one-offs like NAtional Geographic and BBC shows.

All in all though, TV Shows are square and movies are rectangular.

 

[DP812]

Anyway, I was curious to see where most people get their album art from? For Movies I pull out of IMDB and use firebug to isolate the URL for the image. Then I pull directly from their art servers.

For movies, I usually go through The Movie Database. It's what iFlicks defaults to when it tags my movies and most movies have a lot of different posters to choose from. If I can't find something on there, I'll check out Valkae or Get Video Artwork. Both of these are also good for TV shows (although GVA has a much larger selection than Valkae).

For TV shows, if I can't find it on GVA, then I'll hit up The TV Database. They don't have artwork in the 600x600 iTunes format for TV shows, so I'll muck about with the images in Photoshop until I get them to where I like.

And if I can't find what I want on Valkae, MDB or GVA for movies, the Movie Poster Database has some great images that I'll mess around with in Photoshop if need be. Failing that, Google Images.



...I spend too much time on video artwork.