The question is, how would you utilize the time? One of the possibilities is filling the boring commuting hours by watching movies or catching up with your favorite TV series on your portable multimedia player. Thanks to the gigantic capacity of storage available today, we can practically bring tons of movies inside our pocket. The classic white iPod is my wife’s best companion on the road, while I can go along just fine with my small screen smart phone.
The Cows That Tidies Up The Messy Movie Tags
Problem is, not all movie files are created the same way. Because there are many resources that you can use to get your movies; such as buying them from online store, downloading them using torrent, or ripping them from CDs/DVDs; you will also get many different tagging systems. Most of the time, we’ll come across files that look like this: “tvamdi_113.tv-lol”. Unless you are a psychic, it’s difficult to guess what’s inside. Imagine having to go through those gibberish on the small screen every time we want to find a movie to watch. Life would be so much easier if all the movies are properly tagged. We’ve discussed the topic of tidying song tags using Tagr, and similar process could also be applied to movies using an app called MetaX. This free app is available for Windows and Mac, and it will help you tidy the tags in a snap. Literary. The first time of running MetaX, the app will give you several confirmation windows. Starting from the familiar checking for updates question, continued to the question of whether or not you want to search for tag data automatically, the offer of Enabling integration with tagChimp.com, and reminder about the importance of making backups of your data.
Then you’ll have the main window of MetaX before your very eyes.
Going Through The Preferences
As always, it’s good to start “messing around” with any app from the Preferences (Command + Comma). The first one is “General Preferences” where you can modify the general settings.
The “File Level Preferences” deals with type of incoming files and their name tagging.
The “Data Preferences” gives you options of sources to get the data. There’s an option to get and share data with tagChimp.
While you’re not required to have tagChimp account to get data from the service, you need an account to be able to share. If you want to do so, just register yourself for an account in their website.
The last one is “iTunes Preferences” and it is fairly simple.
Start The Tagging Process
To give tags to a movie, you have to open it in MetaX. If you choose to get prompted in the “File Level Preferences“, a confirmation window will pop up asking you what kind of movie that you open.
Then the opened movie will sit on the “Search” pane while MetaX doing the data searching. Most of the time, you will get the results within seconds. Just browse through the choices and pick the best result.
The related tags of the selected result will be presented in the middle pane.
If the everything is satisfying, double click the selected result in the search pane and the tags will be locked to the file. Locked tags have checkmark on the box next to it. You can also add and/or edit the tags manually. And if you don’t want your manual tags modified by the search result, just lock the tag. You can modify more data about the movie by going to the “Video” tab.
Unless you want to be very detailed about the tags, you don’t need to mess with other tabs. You can add more movies, and the list will be presented in the “Queue” pane on the right.
Repeat the process for other files in the queue, and if everything is set, you can click the “Wirte & Share” button at the toolbar. If you choose “Send to iTunes after writing” in the “iTunes Preferences“, your tagged movies will appear in iTunes, ready to be transported to your iPod.
Please note that MetaX only works with MP4 movies. That’s why it’s a perfect tool to tag movies for your portable multimedia player since MP4 is the accepted format among such devices. Use Handbrake to convert other movie formats to this mobile-friendly format Have you tried MetaX? Do you know other alternatives to free movie tagging applications? Share your thoughts and opinions using the comment below.
