For a long time I was an avid windows user, and had a hard time properly tagging my videos for iTunes. I prefer to add MPAA ratings, actors, and all the data that you cannot add directly in iTunes itself. I didn’t like the fact that the videos would show up wrong, or the artwork was jacked up. Now to clarify, most of the videos you buy directly from the iTunes store or get as a digital copy off your DVD’s come properly tagged. The crisis was for downloaded content or movies that I rip from my personal DVD collection.

Now that I am a full time mac user, I heavily rely on a couple of programs for getting the job done. If you want to get your personal DVD’s into iTunes and tag them the right way, I recommend the following combination of programs. Handbrake and MetaX. Handbrake is an open source app that takes DVD’s and a variety of other video files and converts them to a host of formats, the main one being MPEG-4 which is iTunes and iPod friendly. MetaX is a meta-data tagging application capable of batch tagging MPEG-4 as well as QuickTime videos.

Both programs will make your ripping and tagging much easier, and handbrake will throw the file into MetaX if you change that in the prefrences.

It’s an easy way to make sure that all your files are properly tagged and so iTunes puts them in the right place.

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