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Now this is not a big issue if you obtain your music videos from the iTunes Music Store itself; those videos and any others in the aforementioned formats import and play pristinely within iTunes. But what if your music video collection is comprised mostly of Windows Media (WMV, ASF) files? You're left in the cold.
I am one of these people. Well, kind of. I really have no music video collection yet. However (Mac zealots would kill me for saying this), I would prefer my video collection be in WMV format. Why? Well, chiefly for hard drive space. A typical music video in MOV format from the iTMS is ~40MB, while it's WMV counterpart is ~11-12MB. I'm a poor college kid, and having to go out and buy another hard drive to store videos literally means spending the same amount of money I spend on food in a month. Needless to say, I'd prefer to use the space I have now, and be conservative in doing so. Although iTMS videos are hands down better quality when viewed at their full dimensions, iTunes plays the video in the space reserved for album art. In my case, this is a 300x300 pixel area- and that's much bigger than most users view their art. At 300x300, a MOV looks about the same as a WMV anyways dur to resizing and compression issues.
In addition to the conservation of hard drive space, you have to face it- far more music videos are in WMV format than MOV. Places like Launch.com have much more video content to choose from than the iTMS, and that is itself a major reason to choose WMV.
So...on with the tutorial.
1) First, you need videos. I'm not going to explain how/where to get them, but this would be a great starting place.
2) Spend $10US to buy a nifty little plugin called Flip4Mac. Flip4Mac allows QuickTime (and therefore, all Apple apps using QuickTime) to play back WMV files, including those encoded with the WMV3 codec, which cannot be played on most other media players for the Mac. Flip4Mac is availible in a demo if you don't feel like shelling out the cash immediately; however, the demo only plays back the first half of the video before quitting, just to forewarn you.
3) Once you have downloaded and installed Flip4Mac, quit and then restart iTunes. This will restart the QuickTime components that iTunes uses to render video.
4) Next, go to the folder in which you keep your music videos. Select any WMV file, then hit "Command+I". When the Get Info box appears, look for the "Open With..." option. From the drop-down menu, select "Other...". You'll get a navigation box prompting you to pick an application. Find and select QuickTime, then hit "OK". (If Quicktime is grayed out, you'll need to go to the drop down menu at the top of the dialog and select "All Applications" instead of "Recommended Applications").
5) Once you hit "OK", you will return to the Get Info box. under the "Open With..." box is a button that says "Change All..."; click this button and answer "Continue" at the dialog box. This associates all WMV files with Quicktime.
6) You're almost done. Now you'd think all there was left to do is to drag your WMV files into your iTunes library and start watching away, right? Wrong. Even though QuickTime (and thus, iTunes) now have the ability to play WMV files, iTunes is a picky bastard and refuses to import anything with a nasty Microsoft extension. Therefore, the extension ".wmv" that's at the end of all your videos needs to be changed to ".mov". This sounds like a daunting task, and it can be if you do it by hand. But if you use an app such as Automator or FileWrangler, renaming these extensions can literally be done in seconds. It should be noted that even though your videos have had their extensions renamed, they are all still WMV files- only now they're pretending to be MOV's. A bit funny, eh?
7) Now that all your videos end in ".mov", iTunes is more than happy to admit them into it's library. Importing videos can be done by selecting "File>Import...", or by simply dragging the files from a Finder window into an iTunes playlist or the Library itself. Better yet, once all your videos have been imported, the metadata in them can be edited, just as if you were editing the ID3 tags for your MP3's- a great thing for anal-retentive music elitists such as myself.
Click on the picture below to see a full size screenshot of the final product:
I have only one little interesting and minor bug to report...if you manually pause the playback of the video, then hit play again, the video's audio and video tracks will be out of sync for the remainder of playback. What makes this even more interesting is that if the video temporarily lags because of computer performance (CPU, RAM, etc.), it will adjust itself and re-sync normally. Weird.
I hope all you Macheads out there found this helpful. I'll be glad to answer any questions to the best of my ability. Enjoy your music video viewing!
-godpunk
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