by The market is incredibly well catered for when it comes to organising and finding matter data for your audio yet when it comes the video pickings are somewhat slimmer. iVI is an all in one meta data collector and video convertor meaning your iTunes library will show all cover art and show information.
Recently I took a look at iDentify, an app that looks up the meta data for your video from various sources on the Internet and it was a darn fine app. The only one real downside, if you could call it that, is that it would only work with .MP4 or .MPV format. So obviously this meant you had to convert your video before you could use identify.
iVI takes it to the next logical step, accepting anything any video format and looking up the shows information at the same time. Basically it’s an all in one video converter and fetching metadata at the same time.
iVI Gives You Plenty Of Options
My description alone doesn’t cover half the other features available within iVI. You can set it to monitor download folders to check every X minutes for a new file. In short there’s a ton of things under the hood that would cater to most peoples needs if you want to delve deeper. You can even automate actions using Apple script and so much more. Completeness is the name of the game of iVI
Filling In Missing TV Show Or Movie Information
I stumbled across iVI as I was looking for something to fill in my missing iTunes meta data information. For song there are plenty of options such as Tune Up and Music Picard to name but a few
If you aren’t sure what Meta data is, well it’s the information shown when you right click and get info. It’s the data that provides song titles, artists and for the OCD amongst us, album work to keep things looking nice within iTunes. After ripping my Man Of Steel DVD you can see on the left what I ended up with and then a shot after running things through iVI
Filling in the missing information is the most basic action you can perform here. For this DVD i could even add my option chapters, insert subtitles, crop the video, adjust the audio loudness and if I really wanted to, join a video to the end of this one. There really is a plethora of options to play with.
It makes me happy to see nice album artwork within iTunes and yes, you could go off, do an image search, download the image, get info on the video, click the artwork tab, drag and drop but I like to make things easier for myself.
There is a handy built-in net tag editor which allows you to change the name of the show which is normally used to look up the information. For example if you were so inclined to do so, you can download a show called is binding dying which will show in the following format
Eastbound and down. That fails when looking for the show’s information however writing eastbound & Down it will find the shows information. You can also customise the filenames after conversion to your performed format this feature may be restricted depending on where you purchased this from.
iVI Video Conversions
By default iVI will attempt to standardise the video resolution for Apple devices (as part of the setup) or you can set it to Original which will leave the video aspect ratios the same and make sure it’s in a proper .h264 format.
As long as Pass Thru is set to yes conversions will fly through, being transcoded to the settings of your choice. If for any reason iVI needs to do additional converting then it’ll list the reasons why. Speed wise for a video conversion it’s pretty much dependant on your hardware. On a 2011 Mac pro supporting 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 with 8gb on Mavericks a full length film would take about 30 minutes conversion time. This is without using SSD which always gives a boost for things like this.
The App Store version is sandbox meaning it can’t write to files outside of it’s own program yet division you can purchase directly from their website is pretty much restriction free. Also it’s worth noting that purchasing the pro version directly from the author normally means you are on the more current version of the software as you aren’t having to wait for Apple to approve any updates.
This program also exports any conversions directly into your iTunes library and believe me once you start having a library that’s complete with cover art for all your videos it’s hard to go back.
iVI Overall thoughts.
For doing a simple task like pulling down show information iVI – South Pole Software is great for doing just that. From converting your video to being able to crop, adjust, add chapters and more it’ll even keep most power users happySetup requires a little thought to get things fully automated but the investment is worth while. Once you have all the information for everything in your iTunes library it’s hard to go back
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