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January 14, 2006
iTunes 6.02: Now with video sharing
With all the attention on the new ministore presentation, no one seems to have noticed that iTunes 6.02 enables video-sharing to your local network. Whether it's intended for an upcoming home media appliance or not I don't know, but it brings videos up to par with music.
Neither Apple's main iTunes page nor its “Share & Stream” page mention this, and the Share & Stream page refers multiple times to “music sharing,” but it's definitely enabled, as the screenshot below demonstrates.
Once you've installed iTunes 6.02, that machine will publish a “Videos” playlist, visible to but not accessible by iTunes 6.01.
There's still some weirdness going on. I've upgraded to 6.02 on my wife's iMac, and I can't see two videos she bought with an earlier version of iTunes. From my daughter's partition on my G5, I can stream a music video she bought Thursday (probably with 6.02), but can't see two movies I converted to .m4v format after capturing them on my EyeTV, even though they show up as Videos in iTunes.
I'm experimenting now to see if I can figure out a way to make the older videos show up for sharing, and how to export EyeTV movies that can be shared. If you have any insight, please e-mail me.
Update: Blue Coconut, the application for downloading music from a networked playlist, works exactly the same with video files.
Update 1/19: Welcome Digg.com readers. I'm still looking for info on how iTunes decides which videos to display (I encoded a TV episode the other night, and get full audio, but only a still frame when I try to stream it). If you have any insights, please comment.
January 14, 2006 in Apple, Apple - Software, General computing, Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
Inconsistent results here too. I've been playing with this for a few days. I seems to really like iPod compatible videos that I've converted with ffmpegx, but not the ones I've converted with iSquint. More experimentation to come...
I've not had any stalling though - everything plays nice and smoothly.
Posted by: Alan at Jan 19, 2006 4:29:43 PM
It seems that any videos imported with 6.0.2 stream, while videos imported (or purchased) with previous versions will not stream.
Also, you can now label a video as a TV show, without having to use an something like Lostify.
Posted by: Natrino at Jan 19, 2006 5:13:06 PM
whats that movie yer playing?
:p
Posted by: miek at Jan 19, 2006 6:01:14 PM
That was a freebie episode of "Monk" that was available last week.
Posted by: Frank at Jan 19, 2006 6:43:53 PM
Hi,
this seems to be a half-baked feature. e.g. it's not possible to view a movie full screen.
nevertheless, it even works with mt-daapd if you put .mpg in the "extensions" directive of your mt-daapd.conf.
at least when you multiplex your videos with "mplex -f 8" when recorded with VDR.
Posted by: Igor at Jan 20, 2006 4:32:35 AM
Yeah, video podcasts downloaded in 6.0.1 don't show up in the video sharing, but any you download with this version do. That seems like some sort of bug.
Posted by: george at Jan 20, 2006 11:11:34 AM
All you need to do, I've found, is remove them from your library, then re-add them. They'll show up then.
Posted by: george at Jan 20, 2006 11:28:21 AM
I installed the new version and don't see a videos playlist
Posted by: Phenow at Jan 22, 2006 12:31:44 AM
Well I just tried this out and am somewhat amazed.
At first some video stuff (that I had put in the library pre v602) didnt show up as available, but as hinted somewhere I deleted this from the video library, and then put it back in again usung itunes 602 and all was ok.
Sharing worked straight away, and contrary to Igor's experience I could see stuff full screen ok from the client computer (mac or pc). Oh yes and it worked fine cross platform too. I even got acceptable results over wireless from my ibook which only has an old airport card and therefore v limited bandwidth.
Some h264 video ripped with handbrake needs to be exported as hinted movie using quicktime pro else it wont run shared.
Only fiasco found so far is itunes 602's new ability to export to ipod format (right or ctrl click the video in the library). This is supposed to be able to turn video into format digestable not only by ipod but also itunes video sharing. it works, but i found that the .mov files i processed all got bloated out by a factor of 3.5 ! I later found that the original versions shared ok (dont know if the would work on a video ipod as dont have one), so advise only use this option as a last resort to get stuff shareable.
Posted by: jim at Jan 30, 2006 10:45:02 AM
hi I'd like to put some footage online but this video shareing is new to me,could any one tell me how you use itunes to dwnload your footage?
Posted by: jason collins at Mar 22, 2006 7:10:53 PM
great!!!
Posted by: Adan Escudero at Nov 1, 2006 2:34:50 PM
It's too slow! I'm trying to make an iTunes video library so we can watch family videos stored on the upstairs computer, but the share is so slow it's not even worth it. Do they have to stream? Do you have to resave them with quicktime as streaming videos? Tnx.
Posted by: Geekmom at May 20, 2007 4:09:16 PM