Set Video Kind within files

By Jesse Hollington @jhollington ● Thursday, August 23, 2007

Q: I have searched high and low for an answer to this rather vexing issue. On my 5G 80Gb video iPod, I have a variety of “music videos”, “TV Shows” etc, all of which I created from my own DVD collections. These were individually tagged in iTunes by changing the “Video Kind” (ie, Music Video, TV Show or Movie). However, I have discovered that the changed Video Kind tag info is NOT actually stored in the file on the PC. Can anyone help with this ?

- BK

A: Actually, this is a known issue with iTunes. Most of the tag information that you modify within a video track, including information such as Show Name, Episode ID, Season Number, and so forth does indeed get stored in the file. Unfortunately, however, for some reason the “Video Kind” tag does not get stored in this way when modified through iTunes itself.

The only solution to this at the present time, unfortunately, is to use a third-party tagging solution such as AtomicParsley or one of the products based on it to set the “Video Kind” tag. AtomicParsley edits the metadata within the actual M4V/MP4 files themselves, thus ensuring that these changes are reflected in the actual file tags, and not merely within the iTunes library.

To do this, you can simply grab a copy of AtomicParsley from http://atomicparsley.sourceforge.net/ and run it from the Windows command prompt. A command sequence similar to the following:

AtomicParsley My-TV-Show.m4v --stik "TV Show"

You can also set other metadata with AtomicParsley if you prefer, although most other changes made in iTunes will be reflected within the file tags themselves, so this is not strictly necessary unless you want to use AtomicParsley to tag your content before you import it into your iTunes library.

Note that this change can be done for content already in your iTunes library as well, and can be done in conjunction with changes made through iTunes itself. Note that any changes made to the underlying file tags through AtomicParsley or a similar tool will not be reflected in your iTunes database until you select the track from within iTunes in order to force it to re-read these tags.

As an added bonus, AtomicParsley will allow you to add other tags that are not normally editable through the iTunes interface, such as original air date and rating information, among others.

More information on tagging videos within iTunes and using third-party tools can be found in our article, The Complete Guide to Managing iTunes Videos.