Another fix…
I just posted Lostify 0.7.4 on the download page. There are no new features; it just fixes a bug reported by pharwood (thanks!), who found that 0.7.2 had inadvertently broken the iTunes integration features. That should be working now, but if anyone finds anything that doesn’t work as expected, please just let me know.
September 14th, 2008 at 4:09 am
Hello !
In iTunes 8, some TV shows came out in HDTV, just near the rating (for example TV-MA, etc.) we can see a little “HD” logo.
Is there a way to tag this “HD” logo on a file which not bought on iTunes ?
Best regards,
Arnaud CRESP from Belgium.
September 14th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
I second this notion! I have quite a few HD files and I love the little logo. It sure beats appending (HD) to the end of every file name. I fired up atomic parsley and saw the HD tag itself, but I’ll be honest- I have no idea what I’m doing nor how to recreate it.
Thanks for all the work, and even if the HD thing isn’t possible, I have to say Lostify is one of the most useful apps on my computer, and it’s free, so thanks again!
Cheers,
Justin
September 14th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Arnaud & Justin… thanks for the suggestion. Until now I had never downloaded anything HD from the iTunes store, but I just got a free HD episode of Monk and figured out what the HD tag was (apparently the “hdvd” atom). So hopefully I should be able to add this to the next version of Lostify. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
September 15th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Awesome ! Hope you’ll be able to do it !
Thanks in advance, love Lostify !
Cheers,
Arnaud.
September 16th, 2008 at 1:57 am
Does Lostify move the MOOV atom to the front of the file if it’s not already there?
The reason that I ask is that the TiVo Series3 and TiVo HD require that h.264 files have the moov atom first in order to accept and play h.264 files.
Developers of tivostream (http://code.google.com/p/tivostream/) have written C code so users can mod ffmpeg to move the moov atom. I’m hoping that Lostify would be a better way.
September 16th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
JL… I haven’t done any testing with TiVo (anybody want to donate one? :-), but my understanding is that AtomicParsley by default reorganizes MP4 files such that the metadata (which is in the moov atom) comes first in the file, as required for streaming and as suggested in the MP4 spec. Again, this is just what I’ve heard, I don’t know if it’s right or not.
So usually, after AtomicParsley processes a file, the moov atom is first, followed usually by a little free space, followed by mdat (which is the section that contains the actual movie). Lostify also inherits this behavior, so ostensibly, your speculation seems to be right.
Now, AtomicParsley does have some options that allow files with a trailing moov atom to be preserved in this “reverse” order — because in that case, it’s very quick to make any sort of modifications on the metadata. Presumably that’s why the ffmpeg folks made their encoder put moov last — you can simply leave the huge mdat in place, and just quickly rewrite the tags on the end of the file without any risk of corrupting the movie. However, because this reversed file structure disallows streaming and is not expected by many applications, Lostify does not make those options available to users, and always “optimizes” the files it writes to put the moov atom first.
Hope this helps. If you discover something Lostify perhaps ought to be doing differently, please let me know.
October 3rd, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Hey buddy,
Just want to give you a virtual prop for your hard work!
Thanks a lot
Alex.
October 5th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
I’m actually, hopefully, waiting for you to release an update so I can add the “HD” tag on some of my shows. I would love to be able to add this feature..
Its kinda cool how iTunes “knows” and sorts standard definition and HD files into one single “file” name per say.
(ps.. anybody know how this is done, or how can it be achieved?)
October 8th, 2008 at 2:50 am
I’m waiting for the release too! I’m curious to see if the HD tag doesn’t work only on TV Shows files (Movies too ? :p)
Thanks in advance for the future release of Lostify !
Best regards,
Arnaud.
October 25th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
I am new to this utility. I have an external hard drive with well over 500 gigs of TV episodes most ripped from DVDs by Handbreak. So far I have ripped the files to the hard drive then dragged them to iTunes running from my internal drive. Then using iTunes getinfo have changed the tags from the default Movie to TV and added the name, episode ID, and season. Once I’ve watched an episode or a season, my routine has been to delete it from my internal iTunes as this drive is way crowded. I keep all the archived episodes on an external 1 TB drive so that next year when I’ve forgotten these episodes, I can again drag them back. But then I have to retag them. So I thought there really ought to be some way to tag video files. And, lo Google brought me here.
As I say, I AM new, so my comments may have been long ago covered. My first difficulty was after I installed the dmg file and clicked on the resulting app icon, nothing came up on my screen. In every other application I’ve ever seen, some sort of work area appears. After a number of retries, and deletes and reinstalls, I realized that clicking on the Lostify icon does show a menu at the top and I can click on “Open.” Once I realized this, I was good to go, but because I am retagging hundreds of old files, I’m finding it tedious to always have to go to file>open and select the next file. Could you implement a default of opening the next file in the folder?
I have each episode saved as xx - yyyy.mp4 where xx is the episode number within the season, and yyyy is the Episode name. You have a window for “Production # (e.g. 202)” while in the readme file this field is called “Production ID (string data)” This confused me slightly because ID is the iTunes field I’m used to filling in with the name of the episode, and I thought Production # would be calling for a number. Is it possible to construct an apple script that would read the name I give the file and have it strip off the xx and put that figure in the Episode field, and the yyyy into the Production # field? Then I could lock in the series title, season, artist, Genre and have the script do the two important new fields automatically while I go down for a cup of coffee!
One final question here. If I fill in the Description with a sentence or two, will that appear on my iPod? I know on some podcasts there appear sometimes quite a lot of information. I would love to be able to put liner notes from a CD or 33 record that I’ve ripped to my iPod, and some notes on TV episodes would be great too.
Thanks for making this tagging possible!!
Rik
October 26th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Rik, some responses to your message:
What I think of as the “normal” means of opening a file in Lostify is to simply drag a file to Lostify’s dock icon. If you choose to run Lostify manually, just do so (its icon will appear in the dock), and then drag files from Finder onto the icon in the dock. Or if you tag files frequently enough, you could right-click Lostify’s icon in the dock and choose “Keep in dock”, and it will always be there (whether it’s running or not) ready to tag any MP4 file you drop on it.
You can drag any number of MP4 files onto the dock icon, and they will come up one-by-one (in alphabetical order); this explains why there is no means of opening the “next” file in the folder. Also note, if you’d rather use File > Open to open files, you can select multiple files at once, and (once again) they will come up one after the other.
Interesting idea. I haven’t added AppleScript support to Lostify… I may look into that in the future. As far as tagging things goes, the episode title normally goes into the “Name” field in iTunes/Lostify. What iTunes refers to as the Episode ID (and Lostify has variously called the Product ID or the Production #) is a “string” in that it can contain any alphanumeric information you want to put in there, but it is usually used for the production number of a tv episode, which is usually a number (sometimes prefixed or suffixed by letters) that may comprise both the season and episode number of a show. Different shows use different schemes for these production numbers, but most shows have them. Or it may just represent a sequential numbering of episodes across all seasons. Just depends on the show. Also, some users choose to put their own numbering or identification scheme in here.
No, as far as I know the description does not make it onto an iPod. At least it doesn’t go on my old 5G iPod; I don’t know for sure about newer Touches.
Thanks for your comments!
–Lowell
November 7th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Just wanted to say Lostify is awesome.
Just solved me some headaches!
Thanks a mil!
November 19th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
I’m getting a couple of errors when I use Lostify 0.7.4. First, every time I open a video file, I get the error “AppleScript Error — Can’t get item 2 of {”TV-14″}. (-1728)”. Then, after I modify the metadata and hit “Apply”, I get the answer “AppleScript Error — Can’t get every «class datl» of «class null». (-1728)”. After that, nothing happens — no metadata is altered. I have tried multiple video files, and all produce the same result, even ones I have edited before (with Lostify 0.5).
Is this a known problem? Is there a fix? I would dearly love to use Lostify again, but now I’m pretty stumped …
December 1st, 2008 at 7:14 am
Hi Lowell,
I’ve been having trouble with files created by the newer versions of HB - snapshot builds 4 & 5 and the newly released 0.9.3. It seems as though Lostify will process the file the first time, but if you run it through again to make amendments, the file Lostify subsequently produces is unreadable by QuickTime - the file will open but will just display a black screen in place of the video and audio. This happens regardless of whether you choose to re-embed the tags or not.
I’d appreciate any tips you may have to troubleshoot this problem - and thanks again for a superb app!
December 26th, 2008 at 6:38 am
Hi,
I downloaded lostify just an couple of minutes ago and really like it. But there is one big issue, I think: How can I make batch lists? I don’t want to wait for lostify to finish after tagging one file. I want to safe all the tagging stuff of a couple of files and after this, lostify should start changing everything. That’s not possible right now, isn’t it?
December 26th, 2008 at 6:54 am
Michael… that’s correct, right now you can’t do true batch processing in Lostify. That may be introduced at some point in the future (if I can ever find time). For now, the closest thing offered by Lostify is to use the lock buttons on each field to fix data that is shared between the various videos you’re tagging (so you only have to enter that information once), but you still have to wait while each file is written before you can enter the information that differs and start the next one.
December 26th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Yes, I know this feature. So why you just pass the encoding into a new thread and open the gui of the next file while the old encode is still running? I’m not familliar with your classes in your programm, but to me this sounds very simple to do, isn’t it? Just an idea I got today.
December 26th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Michael… that’s a good idea… the only problem is that Lostify is written in AppleScript Studio, and AppleScript does not have any threading or synchronization constructs that I’m aware of. (Lostify was originally intended to be a really simple GUI on top of AtomicParsley, so I used it as an opportunity to learn AppleScript — but that limits somewhat the things I can easily do.)
Since the tagging/file writing itself actually happens in a separate process (Lostify launches AtomicParsley in a shell to do the tagging), there may be some way to do what you’re suggesting by using separate background processes (instead of threads), but synchronization is still a little tricky. I’ll think about it.
January 1st, 2009 at 8:55 am
Oh ok, I thought it was written in XCode with Objective-C. Well I’m not familliar with AppleScript Studio. But anyway, the tool is great and I really like it!
Happy new year!