Tagging Movies
It’s really easy to stream movies around the house with Apple products. Apple has “Home Sharing” which allows all the devices to share all the media when on the same network. Music, movies, video’s etc. So I’m ripping our movie collection into Apple video format and saving them on our Mediacenter computer. The media we’ve purchased from Apple has all these rich tags in the file. Movies have their synopses, the actors/actresses in the movie, and other great information. I was talking with a friend and he pointed me to the first program listed below. It wasn’t very successful so I started searching for something different. Below are the 3 Mac programs I’ve used and my brief thoughts about each one. Please use the comments, if you have questions feel free to ask.
A friend told me about a program MetaX. I installed it and tried it but it only found probably 10% of the movies. I tried a couple of things and it wasn’t any better. So I downloaded the instructions which didn’t offer anything I didn’t already know.
I did some searching and found MetaZ. Someone took MetaX, updated it, and added some of their own features. I found it to work much better at finding tags than MetaX. This program displays the size of the album art it finds. Which is important because the Apple TV and future devices will be displaying the artwork on a large TV at high resolution. A little 200 x 200 thumbnail is fine on a website but not blown up on a high resolution TV.
My favorite app for this task ends up being iDentify. If it doesn’t find the movie based on the file name, go to IMDB and find it. Copy the IMDB code, which is in the url (example “http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0296572/”). In iDentify go the “General” tab, find the “IMDB Code” field, and paste the code in there. Do a search again and it will find all the tags. It finds lots of album art so go to the “artwork” tab and pick the one you like the most. Keep any eye open so you don’t choose one that has foreign language.
