Manually hack m4v track length in iTunes

[Aeryn]

Is this even possible?

I wanted a visual representation of all my videos, regardless of format, in iTunes so I've used a combination of QT reference files for AVIs and placeholder M4Vs for DVD rips. To get the placeholders I Handbraked a 7-second clip of a DVD to M4V and applied metadata. This works to get the coverart in iTunes but the minor annoyance to my OCD nature is that the track length shows as 7 seconds (see image). Is there anyway to hack this information somewhere so I can show the actual runtime?

Thanks!

 

[jackerin]

What comes to mind for me would be to take the 7 second placeholder and paste-to-scale onto a Quicktime movie of the proper length, then extract the new, longer video track and create a new placeholder out of that.

 

[Aeryn]

Not sure I understand exactly the process you're describing but to find appropriate length videos for all the DVDs would be very time consuming and my impatience would win over my OCD tendencies.

I could Handbrake all the videos but I prefer keeping the placeholder files small since I won't be deleting the TS files...no need to keep a duplicate library. I was hoping for some way to manipulate the meta tags to fool iTunes into reporting a different time.

 

[jackerin]

If you have DVD rips then you have movies of the exact length.

1) open original video in Quicktime pro, extract audio.
2) open placeholder image in Quicktime player, select all, copy.
3) paste to fit the length of the extracted audio (alt-shift-paste).

Now you have an image displaying for that duration.

 

[Aeryn]

Thank you very much for the clarification. However, I have neither QT Pro nor the apparently necessary MPEG plugin for VOB files.