README

Metadata Hootenanny

What is it?

It's a viewer/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 Annotaions).  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.

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.

The program's functions, in rough order of priority:

read and sort Quicktime "Annotations"
search and edit Quicktime "Annotations"
read/write/add/remove Quicktime Chapters
play Quicktime movies with features like fullscreen, playlist, key combos for jumping around, changing speed, changing audio tracks, etc
retrieve metadata from web databases like IMDB, EPGuides, and Barnes & Noble
add interactive menus using QuickTime Wired Sprites, with controls like scene selection, audio track selection and text track (subtitle) activation
show file info like codecs, file size, resolution and framerate
edit track info like 4cc, matrix, offset, duration, name and language

Limitations:

The program only uses Quicktime's playback engine to interact with files.  If Quicktime can't play it, neither will Metadata Hootenanny.

Risks:

Since the type of people who annotate their movies are probably the type of people who fear data loss due to shady freeware programs, I'll talk a little about the program's disk access.  The program makes no attempts to modify the original files, unless the user selects "Save In Place" in the save dialog (and ignores the stern warning that results from this selection).  Functions which write to disk are all (slightly modified) Apple sample code, in the C programming language, so I believe they should be safe.  But use at your own risk.

Oddball features:

¥ tab forward in the list during playback, opt-tab backwards.
¥ F enters full screen mode, any other non-modifier key exits (by default).
¥ import chapters from a text file in the format of quicktime (text descriptors ignored of course), or blockbuster/B&N (one chapter per line, text followed by mm:ss in square brackets [ ] ).  You can also choose mov or ogm files to read chapters from them.  If no chapters are found in the chosen mov file, the end points of the audio tracks are used for chapter times (useful if you've been syncing audio in QT Mutator after removing commercials).
¥ option-arrow (the QT combo for jumping to the next selection in/out point) has been commandeered to jump to the next chapter point.
¥ command up/down arrow in the main table text fields to switch between lowercase, capitalized and all-caps.
¥ Drag & Drop:  other movies into the "tracks" view, image files into the sprite editor, image files into the "cover image" view (localized by current movie language)

Regarding support for all text metadata categories, not just the ones defined by Apple. Apple's categories are identified by four-character-codes (FourCCs) like '©cmt' for comment and '©nam' for name. The FourCC for any text data is supposed to start with ©, so now you can enter (and read) your own categories, and if they start with ©, MetaHoot will write them correctly to the file. If you open a file with a non-standard category and it is not displayed automatically, add a column for it by typing the code in the "Column" box. The Macintosh keyboard shortcut for © is option-g. Codes are case-sensitive of course.  Apple has reserved lower-case codes for its own use and instructs users (and programs) to use upper-case codes.  If you enter a category that MetaHoot does not know the code for and does not start with ©, it will be saved (along with all other unrecognized codes) in a custom (and easily reverse engineered) format under the '©MTH' tag.

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to ogmtools, the output of which Metahoot uses to read chapter times from DVDs and ogm files.  Home page at http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/ogmtools/
Modifications to dvdxchap (print total title length) by Henry.  Modified source: http://www.applesolutions.com/bantha/dvdxchap.zip
Thanks to Tony Arnold, who created the pretty iTunes-like table view that Metahoot uses (with modifications) and which works in OS X 10.2 unlike the new colored tableview from AppKit.  Project page at http://members.iinet.net.au/~tonyarnold/archives/000015.html
Thanks to Jan Devos for some other clever interface enhancements.

Support:  http://forums.3ivx.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/forums.cgi?forum=10
Contact:  metahoot@3ivx.com
Home Page:  metahoot.3ivx.com
Alternate Download:  http://www.applesolutions.com/bantha/download2.php
