Fix for iTunes video sharing freezes

For over a year I've been seeking a way to host QuickTime movies on my iMac which I could view, via the network, on my PowerBook. Seems simple but the problem is that encoding at high quality results in a file too choppy to play back via QuickTime. With iTunes 6.02 Apple finally included the ability to share the files via iTunes which is what I wanted in the first place. The great benefit of iTunes enabled movie sharing is that the movie is buffered as it is played which means that playback is smooth. No stuttering playback!

But not all is rosey just yet. We're now at iTunes 6.04 and there are still a few bugs in the process.

The first problem I ran into was seeing videos that had been imported into iTunes previous to version 6.02. After reimporting them I was able to see them in the shared videos in the iMac shared library but not able to play most of them. Upon double clicking I was treated to the spinning beach ball and had to force quit iTunes. Dealing with this second problem requires a program called Lostify which "is a metadata tagger for MP4 videos. It runs on Mac OS X, and the tags it produces aim to be compatible with iTunes." It is beta software and only works with MP4 files but it seems to work. The developer warns that it is beta software so be careful.

Here's the process. Again, from within iTunes delete the movie from the host Mac's iTunes library but do not delete the file(When you select the movie in iTunes and hit the delete key you'll get an iTunes dialog box that will ask if you "want to move the selected items to the Trash, or keep them in the iTunes Music Folder", choose the button labeled "Keep Files"). Open Lostify and drag the MPEG-4 file (from within the Finder) to the Lostify icon in the dock which should bring up a window with all sorts of metadata options. Once you've entered your data Lostify will produce a second copy of your movie in the original directory which will have "temp" in the filename. My suggestion is to rename the original file or trash it (but don't empty the trash yet!) and then rename the temp file to the original name. Then hop into iTunes and reimport the new file. Play the movie in iTunes to confirm that everything is good (you chould compare the files in the finder too and confirm that the sizes are the same or very similar). After you've confirmed the file is good you can safely empty the trash. This new version of the movie should work on any Mac that is accessing the shared movie via iTunes.

Make some popcorn and enjoy your movies!

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, iTunes, iTunes Video, iTunes Sharing