Frequently Asked Questions

FAQs

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When I buy a video through the iTunes store, it shows up in iTunes with a little “i” button next to it. Clicking this button shows the sometimes-lengthy descriptions in a popup window where they are easy to read. Why don’t the descriptions I set in Lostify get this same button in iTunes?

When you purchase a video from the iTunes store, iTunes basically sets a flag in its internal database — When it sees this flag, it knows to put an “i” (info) button next to that file’s description. When the magic flag is not set… then no “i” button appears for that file. The presence of this button is determined internally to iTunes: in fact, if you remove a file that has this “i” button from your iTunes library, and then add the very same file to your library again, iTunes won’t give you the button back.
UPDATE: starting in iTunes 7, there is now a way to address this issue via Applescript. Basically iTunes now lets you tell it (via Applescript) to show or hide the button on a track-by-track basis. The next version of Lostify (0.6) will include some sort of iTunes integration which, among other things, will finally allow this button to be displayed.

Can you implement a feature so that the output file overwrites the original file? or: Is the output supposed to be in a new file named -temp-298374.mp4?

New in version 0.4: this has been addressed somewhat. There are now three different ways to have Lostify’s output files written to your computer: 1. You can cause a set suffix to be appended on the name. This is the default behavior; the suggested suffix is “-tagged”, but you are free to change it. 2. You can cause the original file to be placed in Finder’s Trash can, and the new tagged file can be put in the original location with the same filename as the original. If there is anything wrong with the tagged file, you can retrieve the original from the trash. 3. You can overwrite the original file with the new tagged version. This is dangerous, because the original is lost. Since this is beta software (and likely even after it reaches 1.0), there is no guarantee that the output will not be corrupt. It works fine in most cases, and in those cases where it doesn’t work, it usually does not output anything. However, there have been (and I continue to encounter) situations where AtomicParsley outputs a file that is incorrect or corrupt. Because of this possibility, it is very unwise to overwrite the original file if you do not have a backup of your original files. However, if you do have a separate backup, it is sometimes desirable to overwrite the original. (For why, see next question.)

Why doesn’t iTunes “notice” the changes to metadata right away?

Because it’s just not expecting you to change the information while it’s running. But usually doing a command-I on a file will persuade iTunes to read its new metadata.

When I first drop a video onto Lostify, I get an error something like “AppleScript Error: The command exited with a non-zero status. (1)” I encoded the video using a pre-release version of iSquint. What is wrong?

Some iSquint releases previous to the 1.0 release version (up to and including 1.0rc2) had a bug where they wrote out mpeg4 files in a manner incompatible with the ISO spec. Lostify is unable to work with these files. Try re-encoding the video using the final 1.0 (or later) version of iSquint, as the problem was corrected in this version.

Can you add a progress bar so I can tell how long it’s going to take for each video?

I probably could, but right now there are much higher-prority problems to fix. At some point this will probably be implemented, but for now please stop asking.

The “re-embed” checkbox doesn’t seem to work. What’s up with that?

This feature turned out to be buggy in version 0.2.x; it was removed for 0.3. However it has been added again for 0.4, and it seems to work better now. If you have videos that still suffer from the iTunes underscore bug (where iTunes shows an unwanted underscore at the end of textual data, such as Name, Genre, Artist, etc.), use this setting to fix it.

Can you add iTunes integration, so that tagged files are added or updated in iTunes automatically?

Maybe, I’m looking into this. It may make an appearance in some future version.

Can you add support for marking up .mov, .mpg, .avi, .wmv, .mp3, etc. files?

No. Lostify is intended to support only MPEG-4 files. It is based on AtomicParsley, which supports only MPEG-4 files. If there is any demand to support audio-only MPEG-4 files (.m4a), I may decide to do that. However I will not be adding support for other formats in the foreseeable future. (NB: There is another free project for embedding metadata in QuickTime movies: Metadata Hootenanny. However it does not allow setting all the relevant tags for TV Shows.)

If you use Lostify to change the video kind to “Movie”, iTunes does not recognize it as a movie. What gives?

This has been fixed in AtomicParsley 0.8 and Lostify 0.3.

When I start Lostify, the icon appears in my dock, but no windows appear. What’s wrong?

The usual way to invoke Lostify is by dragging one or more video files onto the program’s icon. For each mp4 or m4v video file dragged, you should get successive Lostify windows allowing you to change the data embedded in each file.

Can you add chapters to video files?

No.

Can you add support for tagging Music Videos and/or Video Podcasts?

You can tag Music Videos right now; Lostify simply doesn’t give you access to all the tags it could (Composer and Category are missing). There is currently no support for the Podcasting-specific metadata. These may be addressed in a future version of Lostify.

Can you add support for tagging Audio Podcasts and/or Audio Books?

If the related files are MPEG4 files, then this is a possibility. But Lostify is focused on video files for the foreseeable future.

Looks like iTunes 6.0.2 added the ability to mark files as TV Shows. Is Lostify now irrelevant?

No. iTunes 6.0.2 lets you mark files as TV Shows, but it does so only in the iTunes database, not in the meta-data embedded in the video itself. If you remove the file from iTunes and add it again, it will show up as a regular Movie. Also, iTunes 6.0.2 does not let you set any of the other TV Show-specific metadata (Show, Season, etc.), so the videos still cannot be organized into series and season (either in iTunes or on the iPod). Similarly, iTunes 7.0 added the ability to designate mark TV shows with episode and season numbers, but this is still only in the iTunes database and is not reflected in the metadata stored in the file itself, so it will be lost if the file is temporarily removed from iTunes.

Can you please make Lostify work on Windows?

Probably not. Lately lots of Windows-compatible wrappers around AtomicParsley have sprung up, so I doubt I’ll be doing anything on this front.

When will the next release be ready?

I can’t say for sure. Lostify is entirely a free-time endeavor for me. Some weeks I have a few hours of free time to work on Lostify, and other weeks I have no time at all to spare. If you like Lostify, please send positive feedback or consider contributing to the project.