iTunes is a difficult application. I don’t mean this with regard to its ease of use—it just doesn’t agree with media obtained from places other than the iTunes Store. Your movies need to be in the QuickTime movie format before they can be imported (a simple yet tedious process of opening each movie in QuickTime Pro and saving it as a QuickTime movie file), you cannot tag TV shows as a group and certain tags aren’t editable, like the descriptions of movies and TV shows, for instance.
Up until this day I imported all my TV shows into iTunes and then manually tagged each one of them, which includes changing the video type to TV Show and entering the name and episode for each and every episode individually. Well, up until now I had also not stumbled upon this really efficient media tagging application called MetaX.
The interface is a little difficult to grasp at first, but once you know how it works, it is really fluid.
All you have to do is drag your iTunes compatible video files into the right drawer and choose from among the tags that are auto generated using Internet services like TagChimp, Amazon and IMDb. If there are no tags, you have to enter them manually. Finally, you just hit the ‘Write & Share’ button and it writes the tags onto your file and uploads them to the TagChimp database so that others can have access to them too (and hey, you get good karma points with God, which are sure to help you in your next life… or something). Sounds simple enough, right? Now, let’s move on to the features.
It detects the name of the TV show, episode titles and season and episode numbers all by itself, which is quite a time saver. The TagChimp service is also really good and produces results for most movies and TV shows. Movies, of course, come with a lot of information like director, actors and short and long descriptions which look great in Front Row or on the AppleTV. MetaX also directly searches for and locates cover art for the movies and TV shows if they’re available on IMDb or TagChimp.
If, for some reason, the tags are not detected, MetaX has a built-in IMDb browser for movies and an IMPA browser for them poster thingies. Oh, and that is not all! You can also use the barcode scanner, à la Delicious Library, to directly scan the barcode on your DVD and have the relevant media info automatically downloaded.
If, even after all this, the much wanted cover art still eludes you, there is a frame grabber which allows you to skim through the movie, grab a frame and set it as the artwork. Last, but certainly not the least, the iTunes plugin allows you to send any movie file from iTunes to MetaX and get it tagged.
If all of that didn’t convince you to give it a shot, I know just the thing that might—it’s free, as in free beer! I’d suggest you go grab this one, and when you are on their site, check out the video demos to see how to use this application to its fullest potential.
