I have many movies saved in iPhoto events and albums. They show up in iTunes on the Mac, and they are synced to iPhone and iPad. But the same movies don't show up in apple TV home sharing photos.
I think Apple needs to add this feature in future updates to AppleTV.
Many of us have home movies that we took on our iPhones and imported into iPhoto.
We'd like to be able to stream these to AppleTV too.
Having to re-manage these movies in iTunes is a pain.
Our photos are organized in iPhoto and are available to stream...so the same should be made true for home movies in iPhoto.
AGupta wrote:
Our photos are organized in iPhoto and are available to stream...so the same should be made true for home movies in iPhoto.
the clue is the title of iPhoto.... it's meant for photos.
appletv gets all content (apart from photos) from itunes.
itunes also offer the ability to convert the movie to appletv format.
if you already have the movie in itunes, it's not a huge task to also add it your itunes library.
it's simply a case of dropping it into itunes... 10 seconds max.
I completely agree with AGupta, and the other posters are missing the big picture of iPhoto default behavior.
If iPhoto was designed as a "photo" only app, why does Apple have it automatically pull in movies during an import from external camera media (CF, SD, etc), and iPhone? Why not auto import those movies into iMovie at that time? As a result of that iPhoto behavior change in '07, I did not bother to put movies in iMovie.
The argument could be made that viewing a movie in iPhoto requires external Quicktime to start, and isn't easy for Apple TV to do. But when I sync my iPhone and iPad, and include sync from iPhoto, the movies in those albums/events are synced along with the photos. And the same devices are able to play those same movies, which have the same CPU and OS as Apple TV, right?
Apple pushed users into this default movie import organization method, and should support the viewing of movies from iPhoto.
If you buy a brand new Mac and a Digital Point and shoot camera. Then connect the two after taking pictures and video. iPhoto will pop up. And if you click import all - then video will also be imported if the fileformat is supported native by QuickTime. So I will say yes: Apple did push for users to import video into iPhoto.
Back to the point:
It's meaningless for me to push every videoclip I have into iTunes, iTunes supports limited file formats, and Apple can't expect everybody to roll with the H264 crowd, lots of cameras shot different formats and transcoding degrades the video.
proximity wrote:
Back to the point:
It's meaningless for me to push every videoclip I have into iTunes, iTunes supports limited file formats, and Apple can't expect everybody to roll with the H264 crowd, lots of cameras shot different formats and transcoding degrades the video.
if you have an appletv (and this is what is being discussed afterall), then you do have to "roll with the H264 crowd" otherwise you won't be viewing your video content on the appletv.
All my movies from my iPhone and from my camera are in iPhoto because that is what they automatically sync to. I have hundreds of them in iPhoto mixed in with my photos.
Apple needs to make the ATV able to play movies that are in iPhoto.
Just because iTunes has the word "tunes" in the title doesn't mean it's just for music. It supports videos and audiobooks and a lot of other stuff too.
The same goes for iPhoto. I completely agree that the videos imported into iPhoto (which are MOV files) should be viewable on the Apple TV. I hope Apple can make an improvement to support this.
I agree that Apple ought to modify either iTunes or Apple TV (or both) to allow Apple TV to display the movies that are stored in iPhoto, without the user having to take extra steps.
Since iPhoto started importing movies from my point-and-shoot and iphone cameras by default, I have been using iPhoto to organize those movies. That means I give them titles and descriptions, and sometimes keywords, to help myself find these movies later. I also group them with photos of the same trip or subject, so the movies are placed and viewed in context.
As it currently stands, by clicking a single checkbox in iTunes, Apple TV will display my entire iPhoto library and respect the effort I have already put in to organizing my photos. I just need to organize them once, in iPhoto, and I get the benefit of viewing them in their album/event/faces groups on my TV. It would be nice if ATV also displayed the descriptions/titles I have added as well, but at least I don't have to drag the photos into itunes to get them to be displayed.
But when it comes to movies, whether they have been organized in iMovie or iPhoto, I have to take the extra step of dragging them into iTunes so that they are viewable in the Apple TV. I usually use option+drag, which allows me to select a bunch of movies in iPhoto, and just option+drag them into iTunes, at which point they are "imported" without actually copying the movie files, which saves on disk space. It also makes sure that Apple TV displays the original, higher resolution version of the movie, not a sized-down iTunes-imported version that claims to be "optimized" for the ATV.
But even that extra step is not really the problem, as it can be done pretty quickly.
The real problem is that all the metadata I have applied to these movies in iPhoto, like the titles and descriptions, are NOT imported into iTunes. This means that, even though movies in iTunes have metadata fields for title and description and many other descriptive things, the iTunes fields are NOT populated with metadata from the iPhoto database. Thus, I have to organize my movies TWICE. Once in iPhoto, and once in iTunes. It's a big pain. I basically go into iPhoto, copy the description text, then go into iTunes, select the movie, hit command+i to display the metadata fields, paste the description into the description field (under the "video" tab), which is empty by default, and copy-paste the title into the title field, which uses the movies filename as default. Importing the titles of the movies into iTunes is more important than the descriptions, because when you're browsing on ATV, the title is how you decide which movie you want to watch, so it ought to be descriptive by default, not just the movie filename, which is often "IMG04862.mov" or something like that.
As a result of this, my photos are visible immediately on my ATV2 as soon as I've imported them on my computer. But my movies are generally not visible until the weekend when I get the hour or two I need to copy over a bunch of my backlogged movies (stored in iPhoto), and update their metadata using copy-paste.
I realize that .mov files don't have the same metadata standards as jpegs, so I'm not expecting the metadata to be written to the movie files themselves when you enter a description in iPhoto. But those metadata are stored somewhere in the iPhoto database, and I don't see why iTunes can't have an option to populate its metadata fields with metadata from the iPhoto database.
Big mistake by Apple.
And we need a way to scroll FAST or Search without relying on Airplay.
I also have the sense from the length of time it takes to drag and drop a movie from Iphoto to Itunes that I'm actually not just creating a pathway, but actually duping the movie and thus using hard drive. Is that accurate?
jackstrawphilly wrote:
Big mistake by Apple.
And we need a way to scroll FAST or Search without relying on Airplay.
At the moment, one thing you can do is group your movies (in itunes) into different "genres". If you select a movie and hit command-i for "get info", you can go to the "info" tab and select or add your own genre. Movies with the same "genre" will be grouped together on the Apple TV in the "sort by genre" option. So, I just use "genres" like "category". I have a genre titled "Hawaii Trip 2010", and all my movies from that trip are viewable in the same group, or folder, on the apple tv. Apparently there was a similar organizational method involving setting your home movies as "TV shows", and multiple movies from the same event could be classified as episodes from the same TV show, and this worked to organize the movies on the 1st generation Apple TV. But I have tried this and can verify it currently does NOT work on the 2nd generation Apple TV. You can apply all those TV show category selection sin iTunes, of course, but Apple TV 2 only recognizes "genres" as a means to group things seperately. It's really not set up well for organizing home movies.
I also have the sense from the length of time it takes to drag and drop a movie from Iphoto to Itunes that I'm actually not just creating a pathway, but actually duping the movie and thus using hard drive. Is that accurate?
If you have both your iTunes and iPhoto programs open, and you just drag a movie from iPhoto into iTunes, then you will see your cursor have a little green plus sign on it before you let go of the mouse button, and yes: iTunes will actually make a second copy of the movie file in the iTunes media library, and import the movie into iTunes. HOWEVER, if you hold the option key while you drag the movie from iPhoto to iTunes, you will not see the green plus sign (you can also do a regular drag, and see the green plus sign, and then press the option key and the plus sign will go away, THEN let go of the mouse button), and the movie will be imported to iTunes, but the movie file itself will not be copied. This is better, in my opinion, because you won't have two copies of the same movie file on your hard drive.
Thanks. That's very helpful! Any chance you might also know how to search and highlight ALL the videos in my Iphoto at once (1000s mixed in to my 12000 photos) rather than go in and find and drop each one?
jackstrawphilly wrote:
Thanks. That's very helpful! Any chance you might also know how to search and highlight ALL the videos in my Iphoto at once (1000s mixed in to my 12000 photos) rather than go in and find and drop each one?
Here's what I do: in iPhoto, you can make "smart" photo albums. Click the plus on the bottom left of the iPhoto window or go to File --> new smart album, and create a smart album that includes any files whose filenames contain ".mov" or ".avi" or ".mp4" or ".mpeg", or whatever type of movie extension your movies have. Then, the smart album will automatically contain all your movies. Then just select all the movies in the smart album, and option+drag them over to iTunes. Now they are all available on apple TV. Now you just need to organize them and add titles/descriptions/genres in iTunes.
