This is something that’s been bugging me for a while, and with iTunes 6 now supporting video, it’s gotten even more annoying.
I don’t understand why Apple doesn’t have an “iVideo” app for organizing and playing all your videos. Music is covered by iTunes; photos are covered by iPhoto. The two apps are nearly the same in terms of design, they just have different features geared towards the type of content you’re working with. This works remarkably well.
And yet, videos get no such treatment. Sure, there’s iMovie (and iDVD) for creating videos, but what about viewing/organizing them later? GarageBand creates music, and that music is properly exported to iTunes, which makes sense. Videos have no equivalent. Instead, videos are handled through a combination of QuickTime, iTunes, and iPhoto.
QuickTime can play the most types of videos, but it doesn’t have any playlist or library features, and it can’t play videos full screen. iTunes can play videos full screen, but it won’t accept many common types of encoding. And iPhoto stores the videos from your digital camera (and doesn’t play them full screen because they open externally in QuickTime).
This is completely inconsistent with how the rest of iLife works, and I don’t understand why. It makes absolutely no sense that if I want to upload a video to YouTube, for instance, I have to browse through my iTunes or iPhoto library. Nor does it make sense that iTunes - arguably the least likely out of the three apps that should have video playback capability - is the only one that supports full screen. This is especially confusing since the apparent reason for iTunes’ support of video is to purchase videos from the Music Store for use on your iPod - all of which are far too low in quality to actually look good in full screen.
Every year they come out with an iLife update, I hope that they’re going to add an iVideo app - and every year I’m disappointed. Is there some reason that they avoid doing this? Aside from the fact that the treatment of video files is illogical, it also creates the situation where my video may be in one of three different locations (iTunes library, iPhoto library, or Movies folder). No other media in iLife suffers from this problem.
Until Apple addresses this, does anyone know of a third-party app that fulfills this need?
iTunes is the front for the iTMS and iPod. Moving video playback out of iTunes would mean taking the movie store out of iTunes as well. The advantage is that it gives you one place to sync your iPod instead of two places.
iTunes is the front for the iTMS and iPod. Moving video playback out of iTunes would mean taking the movie store out of iTunes as well. The advantage is that it gives you one place to sync your iPod instead of two places.
That much of it does make sense. However, look at your iPod preferences. You have options to enable syncing contacts, photos, etc. All those things are handled by separate applications, and iTunes just pulls them over. You don’t have to go to Address Book to sync your contacts, then iPhoto to sync your photos, etc. So it should treat movies the same way - pull them over from a separate app.
Of course, this would only fully work if they moved movies out of the Music Store, as you said, which I think they should do anyway. Music videos I can kind of understand, but why should TV shows (and, soon, full-length movies) be sold in the Music store?
Also, I believe they added video playback to iTunes before they started selling videos in the Music Store (here was no separate “Videos” item in the source list at that point). And, considering the fact that you can drag your own videos into the library, the function obviously isn’t JUST for videos downloaded from the Music Store.
(I’m quoting DaGUY here; the quote buttons don’t work in IE 7)
I’ve always wondered why they don’t have iSync handle the iPod syncing. It could show you your iPhoto and iTunes libraries and let you pick what you wanted to send to the iPod.
I have often thought the whole iPod and iTunes syncing is starting to get complicated as the iPod begins to do more and more. I believe that Apple should create a new program or extend iSync that handles all the syncing abilities for the iPod )contacts, movies, music, photos, calendar events, etc.). Plug in an iPod and the app opens up asking what you want to sync.
As far as video/itunes/ipod is concerned, they should separate it. Create a itheatre or something app and make it hook into the video area of the music store. But this isn’t going to probably happen because…
- Apple has established a brand name with iTunes
- Apple probably doesn’t want to develop another application for Windows and rather just use iTunes for everything.
iSync used to handle the iPod syncing until they moved it over to iTunes. MPMoriarty’s got the right idea in that iSync should handle all the content that you would put on your iPod. Then you could have separate apps for everything, including videos, but still would only have one location to sync everything from.
iSync seems to be near useless at this point. If you open iSync and click .Mac, it tells you to go to the .Mac pane of System Preferences instead. And it won’t even recognize an iPod. So I guess the only thing it syncs now is cell phones. I always though the whole point of it was that you only had to go to one location to synchronize everything…
I agree that Apple should separate the video content out, but probably won’t. I’m guessing their main reasons are loss of the iTunes brand and having to write more apps for Windows. BUt here’s what I’d like to see:
1) A new app, let’s call it iFlicks for this exercise, that handles video content the way iTunes is intended to handle music.
2) A separation of content within the online store, such that it is really one big store using the same accounts and giving you access to the same content, but tailored to show you the media that makes more sense given the app you are in. If you’re in iFlicks, for example, you will presented with new videos, top selling videos, etc. but you can still get at the music if you want to. So let’s say you’re watching an episode of Scrubs and you hear a song you like, you can pop into the store and buy it while you’re thinking about it right then. It will download, pop open iTunes, and add it to the database.
3) Synching returned to iSync (call me crazy), with an updated interface allowing you to choose the content to be synced. If you really want to be specific about what’s getting added, it can drop you into the appropriate program to make more minute choices. And if you have an iPod with limited capacity or capabilities, you can set the default syncing to iTunes like it is now, allowing you more control over how you fill up your Shuffle each time.
This would allow them to continue using the iTunes name for the music-oriented store view if they wanted to. And if they don’t want to write new apps for Windows, they could leave it as is and only refresh the Mac side, because the online store would still contain all the same media. I don’t think they should punish their flagship platform and app suite in order to maintain the platform similarities they have today.
I agree,
iTunes in it’s current state is completly clumsy at doing video and I hate it for that. I usually open the video I want to watch with Quicktime. I wish Quicktime would handle video (open in Quicktime instead of opening in a window in iTunes). And as far as syncing to the iPod - either take the responsibility away from iTunes or add an option to sync from iTunes or iSync (for example), where you define everything you want to Sync aside from Music.
I don’t know what they are doing in iTunes, but video performance is terrible. Opening a video, srubbing through a video, etc. is so slow. Yet, doing it in QT player is smooth. It’s pretty pathetic.
To answer the question if there is already a player besides the iTheatre Front Rown knockoff, Videolan.org has a free, decent video player that most importantly plays VIDEO_TS folders (and there’s a program to use the Apple Remote primatively).
/rant/ Until there’s a 1:1 compression method and “ripping” suite for importing lossless video from DVD with chapters and no loss of quality, etc. etc. (basically an organized way to copy the DVD’s you own)...why waste your time with DivX? Apple needs to give me bigger hard drives and make the XSan consumer-friendly. If there are 750gb hd’s like we discussed on this forum we can put a few in an Xsan and use Backup (which actually corrupted my data) to keep a RAID of our DVD’s and either a copy of those DVD’s on the second hard drive or actually and/or a backup of the rest of your data on both or either. Basically I want it all. I want all my data backed up and enough storage for the full quality, fully usable, no compromise DVD and Blu-Ray support. This project is on hold for me until Apple leads the way and shows consumers the most efficient way to archive their DVD’s safely.
/rant/
Do we need a special app for these video to play? Is there going to be a movies store? The movies store is either HD quality or not…
VLC is not as good as iTunes as far as interface. If Apple offered the product above they’d need to make iTunes faster at loading videos and continue to cannablize their QuickTime Pro selling point (I have the upgrade and there’s more important things it does than full screen so they should cannabalize it. Full screen is a consumer feature but the rest of the features are more serious like mixing 8 channel audio).
I guess it’d be iTunes. The iPod is a multi-function device and once it plays movies the slogan will stay the same; “ipod+itunes”
I agree that Apple should separate the video content out, but probably won’t. I’m guessing their main reasons are loss of the iTunes brand and having to write more apps for Windows. BUt here’s what I’d like to see:
1) A new app, let’s call it iFlicks for this exercise, that handles video content the way iTunes is intended to handle music.
2) A separation of content within the online store, such that it is really one big store using the same accounts and giving you access to the same content, but tailored to show you the media that makes more sense given the app you are in. If you’re in iFlicks, for example, you will presented with new videos, top selling videos, etc. but you can still get at the music if you want to. So let’s say you’re watching an episode of Scrubs and you hear a song you like, you can pop into the store and buy it while you’re thinking about it right then. It will download, pop open iTunes, and add it to the database.
3) Synching returned to iSync (call me crazy), with an updated interface allowing you to choose the content to be synced. If you really want to be specific about what’s getting added, it can drop you into the appropriate program to make more minute choices. And if you have an iPod with limited capacity or capabilities, you can set the default syncing to iTunes like it is now, allowing you more control over how you fill up your Shuffle each time.
This would allow them to continue using the iTunes name for the music-oriented store view if they wanted to. And if they don’t want to write new apps for Windows, they could leave it as is and only refresh the Mac side, because the online store would still contain all the same media. I don’t think they should punish their flagship platform and app suite in order to maintain the platform similarities they have today.
Exactly! That is exactly what I think they should do as well.
I don’t know what they are doing in iTunes, but video performance is terrible. Opening a video, srubbing through a video, etc. is so slow. Yet, doing it in QT player is smooth. It’s pretty pathetic.
Yeah, I’d like to know what the story is behind that too. It takes FOREVER for a video to begin playing. Sometimes I’ll just have songs playing and I’ll forget that there’s a video or two interspersed between them...and when it gets to the video, the whole thing slows to a crawl and I usually get the beach ball. On a PowerBook 1.67 with 512 MB of RAM. Lol.
It’s obviously not the video files themselves, because they open instantly and play smoothly within QuickTime like you said. Clearly it’s the way they implemented it. Must not be optimized or something, or maybe they have to pull some kind of trick to get video to play inside iTunes. Who knows.
Here’s a question. Since installing iTunes on either platform forces you to install QuickTime Player, everyone who has iTunes therefore has the QuickTime player installed as well. So why couldn’t they just have videos open externally in QuickTime? They would play much smoother, it would remove bloat from iTunes’ code, and you could still sync your videos with your iPod.
Well, I wish Apple would just apply the optimizations they did in Quicktime Player to iTunes. I know it’s not the Quicktime framework or Quicktime Player, it’s just iTunes.
This is almost exactly what I want (it’s even called iVideo!). The main deal-breaker for me is that it looks like it’s 5 years old. What’s with those iTunes 1 style buttons? Wrap this up in unified metal like iLife ‘06 and add in the thumbnails view with reflections from iTunes, and it would be exactly what I’m looking for.
This is almost exactly what I want (it’s even called iVideo!). The main deal-breaker for me is that it looks like it’s 5 years old. What’s with those iTunes 1 style buttons? Wrap this up in unified metal like iLife ‘06 and add in the thumbnails view with reflections from iTunes, and it would be exactly what I’m looking for.
Heh, only Apple can make an app that uses standard UI widgets and window styles look out-of-place.
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This is almost exactly what I want (it’s even called iVideo!). The main deal-breaker for me is that it looks like it’s 5 years old. What’s with those iTunes 1 style buttons? Wrap this up in unified metal like iLife ‘06 and add in the thumbnails view with reflections from iTunes, and it would be exactly what I’m looking for.
I disagree… I think it’s a lot better than iTunes because it actually uses system standard widgets, instead of some crappy proprietary widgets that Apple makes up. iVideo won’t work for movies bought on iTunes, so I cannot use it, but it looks like a nice program.
Wrap this up in unified metal like iLife ‘06 and add in the thumbnails view with reflections from iTunes, and it would be exactly what I’m looking for.
