Metadata Hootenanny for Mac

Metadata Hootenanny is a view/editor for all the spiffy metadata you can put into Quicktime movies. You know how you can view, edit and sort by your mp3s' ID3 metadata in iTunes? Well, the same metadata system exists for all your quicktime movies, too, but until now the only way to access it was through the horrid interface of Quicktime Pro Player (You can see certain metadata items in QT's Info window, and add them in the Movie Properties window under Annotations). Metadata Hootenanny lets you access this information more easily. You can make a list of all the videos in your collection with a certain director or writer. You can search your videos for a certain performer, or a keyword in the description. Of course, you have to add all this information to your movies yourself...which is a breeze with Metadata Hootenanny.

Why Would I Ever Want To Have Metadata in My Movies? Ok, ok. Most people probably don't care about movie metadata yet. The best use I see for this program is for people (like me) who have large collections of TV shows or music videos, somewhat short movies that might conceivably be played back-to-back, or collected into small playlists based on subordinate criteria, as might be stored in Quicktime movies' metadata tags (like writer, director, author, album, etc).

What Kind of Metadata Are We Talking About Here? The Program supports all the Annotations that Quicktime uses (Album, Artist, Author, Comment, etc). In Addition, there are read-only properties about the movies, like video/audio formats, file size, and movie length. Finally, it lets you add or edit Chapter Tracks, which are a cool little feature of the Quicktime container format that is seldom used. They're like little bookmarks in the movie with a popup-menu that lets you jump between them. In Quicktime Pro, in order to make a chapter track, you have to create a text file formatted in a certain way, with timepoints you must type out by hand, then import it to Quicktime, add it to your movie, de-enable it, and set it as a chapter track. My way is much easier, trust me, plus if you have a problem or better yet a suggestion, I will be happy to fix it for you. And in case you feel nostalgic for the QTPlayer way, this app exports chapter lists to the quicktime format, ready for import.

That's Fine, But What Else Does It Do? I'm glad you asked. Well, it also plays movies. You can freely resize your movies (not constrained by the original aspect ratio). It has many little playback features that I like. For instance, there are keyboard shortcuts for resizing, skipping forward and backward through the playlist, fast-forward and rewind (at any speed you like). Also, when you return to a movie the program remembers your place so you don't have to hunt around. While you're playing through the movie, you can click a button and send the exact current time to the chapter editor. Did I mention how cumbersome it was to compose a list of chapters for Quicktime Player?

Editing of movies is in the works. For now, you can adjust the sound sync of non-mpeg movies by changing the offset (delay) of the audio track, and changing the duration (speed) of the video track. Some day you'll also be able to split, join, and trim movies as well.