I just got this working perfectly, using josephbphillips’s metadata script above. This is great for getting shows onto my iPhone, and also for streaming movies to my mac mini’s frontrow (my network seems to be too slow to stream the full hd downloaded eps).

Not a major problem — but it would be nice to understand.

Thanks again.

tell application “VisualHub” to set VisualHub to load script (scripts path of main bundle & “/automation.scpt” as POSIX file)

The AppleScript error occurs at “bundle”, and I get “Syntax error: Expected “,” but found identifier”.

Any ideas? Also, is there a way to make this watch a higher level folder and automatically set the TV show metadata name with the folder name?

My setup at the moment uses TVShows and Transmission, so my shows automatically download to my Downloads folder. But, seeing as i’m probably going to be getting a iPhone pretty soon, i’m gonna add the VisualHub transcoding stuff to my setup.

Also, is there not a better way to do the meta-data stuff? Maybe setup a smart playlist with shows added in the last 24 hours that syncs to your iPod?

Great work so far though!

Any ideas?
Cheers.

–Before running, create a smart playlist using the “name contains” variable to select the appropriate files. This example presumes you have set a smart folder named “Sample Show Name”. It will edit all of the metadata for the shows in this smart playlist as set below. Thanks to allenhuffman on macosxhints.com for the script that I modified to achieve this.
tell application “iTunes”

set smartPlaylists to (get every user playlist whose smart is true and name contains “Sample Show Name”)
repeat with thisPlaylist in smartPlaylists
set allTracks to every track of thisPlaylist
repeat with this_track in allTracks
try
set video kind of this_track to TV show
set show of this_track to “Sample Show Name”
set season number of this_track to “1″
on error
display dialog “Failed to add Metadata”
end try
end repeat
end repeat

end tell
—-end—

I know already that since there’s no M68K version of Perian for the iPhone, it might get interesting from there…

If you installed Perian on your apple tv through the Patchstick or through the ATVLoader, your apple tv can play other formats, but it won’t sync them. The fooler works by appending a little clip to the front of a movie that is in the format Apple TV expects. That way, even though the bulk of the file is an unconverted AVI, it has a MOV extension and is imported to iTunes and synced to apple tv the same as a file that has been converted with VH.

This simplifies the entire process, reduces the processing time dramatically, and preserves the picture quality of the original file. The only downside is that the new file is not able to be manipulated with atomic parsley as this is not a true mp4 file.

Doug’s Applescript for Set Video of Kind does, however, allow you to set metadata on these files. That means that I need to figure out how to use applescript to add metadata in the same way he does. The end result will be a smaller, higher quality file with the same meta data- and it is handled in exactly the same way by iTunes and Apple TV. This also eliminates the issue of trying to add a new file to the batch while VH is running, as the conversion time is seconds and can, I believe, run with concurrent sessions.

So as it stands, my new workflow is 1. Run as folder script on all .avi files in my “downloads” folder 2. run script “apple tv fooler” 3. ???? 4. Run Script “add to itunes”. I just need to figure out that step 3 syntax to add meta data. The answer may be that it is actually done after the import to itunes- I’m not sure yet.

The syntax for adding the meta data seems to be something like
on open fileList
tell application “iTunes”
set video kind to TV show
end tell
end open

Any ideas?

Hope this is helpful to you!!