At one time I used to encode my video files with the DivX codec and used AVI as my container. No problem... until you try to organize your collection with iTunes. iTunes provides a nice way to organize TV Shows and Movies, but out of the box I find it unusable. Here is my set of tweaks to allow you to play all of your old AVI files in iTunes (you are switching to mp4, right?). First off, get the Perian QuickTime component from perian.org-- this is an invaluable tool that will allow QuickTime to play just about all of the video formats you will run into (think of it as QuickTime meets VLC). This works just dandy for playing your movies in QuickTIme, but we don't want to just play them in QuickTIme, we want them in iTunes! Try dragging your AVI's into iTunes and you will find that nothing happens. I tried searching around and one solution I found suggested opening all of your AVI's in QuickTime Pro and Saving "reference movies" for them. Well, I don't have QuickTime Pro, even though I probably should get it some day, but upon further reasearch I discovered that Apple has a free utility that will do this for you-- MakeRefMovie! Just sign up for an Apple Developer Connection account (it's free) and you will be able to download it. Unfortunately there isn't any batch method or anything, but now for free you can open up MakeRefMovie, drag the AVI you want into the window, Cmd+S to save it, hit Cmd+W to close the window, and Cmd+N to start the process over with a new window. I'm sure there is a faster way to do this, but I type fast :) If anyone knows exactly what this faster method is, please post a comment as my method is a bit slow for large collections, but hey it's a start and it's free.
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