How to play movies from external hard drive?

Hi SSJAK,

I can think of a couple of ways to accomplish this, though I'm not sure either is really ideal.

One way would be to go into iTunes > Preferences > Advanced, and turn off "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library." I believe this will solve the problem of letting videos stay on the external drive, but it would seem to pose some risk of allowing your library to become fragmented, with files stored here and there on your computer.

The other way is to play the videos in a different app, rather than adding them to iTunes -- for example, QuickTime Player or the VLC media player. I think I might go for this one, and leave iTunes library management intact.

This has been a long running low profile issue with iTunes. You cannot readily split media file storage. It comes down to two scenarios.

One is where you can store them on the external and have them appear in your library, but if the external is not attached when you start iTunes you will see them all as broken links. People tend to not like that but the links will mend if you attach the drive and restart iTunes, or if you attach the drive and play a track for a file on the external.

The second is where you build a separate library just for movies and start from that library when you are using the external. This is a cleaner solution and unless you watch the same movie 5 times in a month you probably don't need your movies sitting in front of you all the time. However, it could be trickier if you let iTunes automatically download items to your library.

Playing them with VLC won't work if these are iTunes Store purchases.

I suspect it might create syncing issues since you would have two libraries and an i-device can only sync with one at a time.

You create a second library and also switch between libraries by holding down the option key while starting iTunes.

If you want to stay with a single library but have media in different locations there's various ways to do this but as I said, unless the other drive is attached iTunes will report broken links to your movies. There's no real harm in this because when you want to use them you make sure the other drive is attached and they will not show as broken (but you must restart iTunes first) , but some might find it annoying.

Yes, there are ways to refresh the links. It is not they are truly broken, it is just when the drive is not attached and iTunes first starts it will not see them and until you restart iTunes it will not check to see if the drive is there in the meantime. If you try to play a file and the drive is reattached iTunes will have a second look and see that that particular file is there. It just don't do it for all of them. There is an Applescript which will do this but it is slow. Otherwise when you attach the drive and re-start iTunes it will have a quick look for links and see the files are there this time around.

I guess some of this depends upon how often you view media. Generally I need about 10-15 years before I am ready to watch a movie a second time so I really, really, really do not need to see it in front of me with an active link all the time. If I have to restart iTunes twice a year to refresh links that is not excessively onerous.