Perhaps it was just me, but I had no idea how cool iTunes was until last night. I’ve used iTunes exclusively for my master music collection for about 5 years now, and, in that time, I’ve been very focused with my music collection. I can’t say the same for my video collection. Only recently, as I began working with my AppleTV, did I actually allow video into my iTunes library.
However, I’ve got a brilliant combination working now. iSquint, the gorgeous free video editor, converts my files into high quality mp4/m4v files and adds them to iTunes. iTunes then pushes them to my AppleTV. It’s incredible to tell iSquint to covert several dozen videos and then the next morning they are waiting on my AppleTV.
In the meantime, I just discovered something on iTunes that I hadn’t realized existed. I went into the overcrowded “Movies” section of my iTunes library and found that you can convert “Movies” to “TV Shows.” Here’s the best part, by filling in the metadata – by adding the TV show title, the season, the episode, iTunes will properly group and organize them. Whereas before, I had a huge section of movies, randomly plunked down in the same view, now I have a view of many logically grouped subsets, much the way iTunes handles artists and albums in grid view.
Furthermore, AppleTV obeys the organization as well! Instead of a silly, long list of movies, I go to TV Shows and then drill down by show, where they are sorted by season and episode.
Using iTunes just got much better. I had been thinking, lately, about how well music organization works in iTunes and how poorly video organization does. I still think that’s the case – Videos are a mess. But TV Shows and Music Videos work well.
Have you discovered iConcertCal yet? Links every artist in your iTunes folder and lets you know when they’re coming to your town. All you do is type in your zip code, the radius you’d be willing to travel for a show and as soon as an artist with an upcoming show or record release is played, you get a quick drop down alerting you to the news. You can also activate a regular calendar that shows all the dates so you don’t have to rely on a certain artist being played to find out about a show.
Way cool.
http://www.iconcertcal.com/
By the way, we all love Steve too and my 5 year old agrees with your assessment, though not in those terms. We watch Noggin after all. D-bag hasn’t hit her vocab yet.