Feed Your Mac A Video And Let A Magic App Convert It For iTunes Automatically

Chances are good you have plenty of videos. If not iMovie clips, then TV shows or movies you’ve downloaded from the web (or, ripped from your DVD collection).

Getting those movies into iTunes and ready for iPhone or iPad used to be a bother. Now there’s a simple Mac app that does all the heavy lifting automatically, including downloading movie or TV show metadata and image artwork.

Make What’s Difficult, Easy

It’s not my job to jump up and down or gush over every Mac app, but Magic Media Marker is worth a look if you’re a Mac user with videos and a family of iDevices.

Here’s how it works. Instead of ripping movies and trying the confusing number of steps to convert them for iTunes, let Magic Media Marker do it.

It sits in the Mac’s Menubar. Click to open a video on your Mac. Magic Media Marker then processes the video for iTunes, or, if it needs transcoding, uses the popular and free Handbrake app to do the hard work.

Magic Media Marker works on TV shows and movies and can tell the difference between the two. Then it downloads from the web all the pertinent metadata that iTunes likes, including image artwork.

Did I mention settings? Uh uh. It’s mostly set it and forget it. Even the access to the complicated HandBrake is automatic.

Set up the app to start up on login and it’s in the Menubar, waiting for a movie. All the processing is handled in the background while you do other things, but you can elect to put the progress bar in the Menubar.

Set it to automatically add TV shows and movies to iTunes (even deleting original files after a conversion is complete).

While set it and forget it is handy, so are more granular controls and Magic Media Marker gives you plenty of options.

Even better, the app checks online TV show and movie databases to update meta data. Automatically. Your iTunes Cover Flow never looked better.

You also get Growl integration so you’ll get notification when Magic Media Marker is finished converting a TV show or movie.

This is the kind of app we wish Apple would build in to a Mac, but the price is modest. Negatives? A few. On one of my Macs there’s been a few crashing during the converting process.

While the integration with iTunes is useful, the meta data and image artwork are not always the best available. But instead of browsing movies in iTunes in list mode, you get attractive movie or TV show posters, and the movies are ready for use on other iDevices.

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