iTunes and meta data

I started out hating iTunes from day one, but I feel that I’m stuck with it to get videos and podcast feeds updated on my iPod video.

I have recently been ripping some of my DVD collection to the machine to keep me entertained.
The application I’m using by default uses the disks name and track information as the default name for an mp4 file. This is obviously fairly useless to someone who pants to pick a clip based on the series I’m ripping and the episode.
Not a problem, I’m used to manually changing invidual items. I’m good at it.

The problem: On a 3meg mp3, the write operation is fairly quick. You blink and the whole file is re-written. Video on the other hand is a little bigger. Using iTunes, this means that I have to wait for the whole file to be re-written before starting to re-name the next file.
This takes forever.
I know with mp3’s the meta-data is at the beginning of a file and I just checked that an mp4 file also has the meta-data near the beginning.
If it had it near the end of the file, it could have at least just changed the end of the file instead of the whole lot :(. But that would mean that anything that wanted to read the meta-data would have to work out how to jump to the meta-data section (possibly taking longer to read)
I guess since reads would occur more than writes, the file structure is read optimised.

Bah.

-= Comments
1. Zooba | October 1st, 2007 at 11:34 am
As I understand, ID3 tags have fixed length fields, which means once the tag has been created the whole file doesn’t require rewriting to modify it.

Possibly an MP4 has a similar structure, in which case getting your ripping software to put a dummy tag in the video will mean you won’t have to rewrite the entire file to modify it later. Having said that, I’ve never played around with ripping videos, but it does work with MP3s.