Scripting Quicktime
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Comments:
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I’m trying to create reference movies (as Quicktime .MOV documents) for all of the movies on my Media server, and the most obvious method is to use AppleScript and Quicktime Player. Why am I doing this? Because iTunes requires Quicktime Movies, I’ve mainly got AVIs, and I don’t want to (a) convert all of them, and (b) have iTunes manage them. I’d rather have the files in the right spot, and allow iTunes to manage the reference movies. Quicktime will often open files of varying types, even though iTunes will not. It’s then possible to save the file, and choose not to create a stand-alone movie. This will create a reference movie, which is much smaller than the original, but requires that the original remains in the same place in order to work. However, using AppleScript, the following will not work if AVIs are set to play in another player, like VLC:
1 tell application "Finder"
2 set theMovies to selection
3 end tell
4
5 repeat with theMovie in theMovies
6 tell application "QuickTime Player"
7 open theMovie
8 end tell
9 end repeat
That is, the movie opens in it’s default application. To get it to work requires simply the following:
1 tell application "Finder"
2 set theMovies to selection
3 end tell
4
5 repeat with theMovie in theMovies
6 tell application "QuickTime Player"
7 open theMovie as alias
8 end tell
9 end repeat
That little as alias causes Quicktime to open it, instead of VLC. How bizarre! The next problem is that by default, it puts the document(s) into a list. I often make the mistake of operating on a list, rather than each item individually. Especially when there’s only one item in the list. It’s like my eyes don’t see the curly brackets. So, we can save the movie, and by default it will save it as a reference movie. Next problem, how do we tell it where to save the movie? It will default to the root directory of the boot disk. Not really where I want to save this file, as I want to do multiple copies. But, what I can do is save the file, import it into iTunes, (ensuring that iTunes creates a copy of this file in it’s library) and then delete the file, or create the next one over the top. What I’m up to so far (and this doesn’t deal with names or anything yet):
1 tell application "Finder"
2 set theMovies to selection
3 end tell
4
5 repeat with theMovie in theMovies
6
7 tell application "QuickTime Player"
8 set mov to first item of (open theMovie as alias)
9 save mov in (file "movie.mov")
10 close mov
11 end tell
12
13 tell application "iTunes"
14 add alias "Macintosh HD:movie.mov"
15 end tell
16
17 end repeat
More later. Sleep time now.
To me, the results look pretty clear. iTunes does not take into account the actual rating, only the star value. Even the new half-stars aren’t notably different. I’ll continue to run the experiment, and put up another post later. I may change some things, and rerun the original experiment, just to confirm it, although my results seem to do this already.