MetaX completes me

In yesterday’s post I talked about my project to convert all of my purchased movie DVDs into MP4 format for streaming playback to any TV in my house (via Apple TV). I got lots of questions about the workflow and some of the questions revolved around Movie Poster artwork. When you rip your Audio CDs iTunes happily finds the missing album art for you and inserts it. It also looks up the track names and other info to help with the process. However, for movies iTunes doesn’t offer much help at all. I was quite content just having the name of the movie and the DVD artwork. I was manually looking up the artwork on the web and copying and pasting it in via the Artwork tab in iTunes Get Info area. It was working! However, the one thing I thought would be nice to have is the Movie Ratings (G, PG, PG-13, R, etc.). Even if I wanted to put these in manually, iTunes doesn’t allow access to this field. So I just decided to live without it.

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MetaX rocks!

The one thing I’ve found out about blogging is that if you blog about a product or workflow, there’s usually someone out there reading that post that’s either done the same thing you’re doing or tried other products that do similar things. I’ve gotten some of my best tech recommendations from the comments area of my posts. Well my blog readers were very quick to offer suggestions to help with my project this time too. Blog reader “Noel” suggested an app called MetaX, which would pull in the Movie Poster art AND other data. Well of course I went to go check it out and I was floored by how well it works!

MetaX polls a variety of databases to grab not only the Movie Poster art, but the description, ratings, actors/acrtresses, chapter names and more! You can go movie by movie and tell it what you want from each database by checking off the boxes in the interface and then let it batch write those tags into your movie files. Be prepared as this process can take 5 minutes per movie on average. I ran it on all the movies I had already ripped and it’s still going as of this morning (almost done though). Speaking of Movie Art, this app even has the ability to allow you to manually crop off the annoying white background that some Movie Posters will come in with.

As you can see above the top two movies have no extra metadata and the bottom two have been run through MetaX to grab the rating, genre, year, description and the movie art (which isn’t shown here).

Believe it or not MetaX is free to download. The author requests a donation via PayPal, which I will be happily making today! It also works great for TV shows. MetaX is a Mac only App. I don’t have a similar solution for Windows users. However, if one exists I’m sure someone will chime in in the comments and let us know.

Thanks Noel for the suggestion! You’ve helped make this project even better than I imagined it would be. My workflow now puts MetaX right in the middle. I go from HandBrake to MetaX and then into iTunes.