I store tons of home videos, DVDs (that I DO own) ripped, etc. on my macbook. Is there any good software that's sort of like what iTunes is to music for videos? I've done some searches, but nothing good really came up. Thanks guys!
iTunes has some video support, although chances are that they're not in a format it likes. I've yet to find anything, but then again, I usually find that just using folders works fine since I tend to know what I want to watch (unlike music, which just goes on shuffle).
I've been ripping my dvds using handbrake/mediafork for a while now.. It dumps out a nice shiney mp4 video which is very well supported by both itunes and my ipod..
what software would you recomend for someone who wants to move their movie library over to their mac? that and whats a good burning software to transfer those movies back to DVD should something happen to the orig. disc?
Depends what format you rip them to. I'm not sure of a Mac-equivalent of DVD-shrink, which is what you'd want for archives. Many people love Handbrake (handbrake.m0k.org I think) for ripping to some sort of compressed format, but I've always felt that it never behaves how it should at least compared to AutoGK. If need be, you can almost certainly import the video file into iMovie, add back in some chapter markers, and then burn it from there (might need to put it into iDVD first). But you'll lose all of the original menus and extras, and probably a good bit of quality as well. My whole logic with ripping DVDs is that it doesn't matter if the disc gets destroyed since I only use the ripped copies to play from. I rip it once and the disc goes away never to be seen again. Which is, unsurprisingly, why I'm rather anal about quality (and why Quicktime makes me pull my hair out... it never seems to play nice with surround-encoded audio and VLC for the Mac sucks). Some day, Delicious Library might have the pictures of your movie covers link to the ripped file... then it might actually be useful software. In its current state, it's pretty but absolutely pointless. If that day ever comes, it'll solve the catalogging issue at the very least.
Well, I've already got a several files in avi format, which itunes doesn't support (at least not without some work). Plus, managing movies in itunes just doesn't seem like the best possible solution. I'd rather have something that's meant for this specific purpose. There's iphoto for pics, itunes for music, idvd for dvds, etc. but nothing (from apple or 3rd party that I can find) for movie files.
