MetaX

It is obvious that my most common complaint about the iTunes and AppleTV platform is encoding issues. Still, there is a second aspect that most of us find annoying: proper tagging of media files.

iTunes simply can't deal with all of the tags that can be used in the movies that it can play:

1. You can't toggle video type.

2. You can't add a rating. You can add your own rating, but you can't mark a movie as PG-13, etc.

3. There is no way to mark a movie as multiple volumes. TV shows have seasons and episodes, movies don't have parts.

4. You can't change the artwork of movies with AC3.

I bet there is more, but those four are the most obvious. I was able to deal with #1 through an AppleScript, but until today I had no way to deal with the rest in a mechanical fashion. Today I learned of a donationware application, MetaX, that does most of that work. I just tested it with a half dozen movies and so far the results are beyond of what I expected.

Not only will it allow me to deal with these issues, but it automates them by both allowing a queue, and implementing automated lookups to both Amazon and the Internet Movie Database.

Kickass.

It even fills the description fields, ratings, etc. The only problem is that in the interest of paranoia, it rewrites your video file, then after completion it deletes the old one and adds the new one to iTunes. It makes for a slow queue, but at least if it fails you won't lose the original file.