Decent app for the price

Have been using MetaZ for awhile, but that seems to choke on certain .mp4 files sometimes (could be the size; not sure). Not wanting to redo hours of compression if it wasn’t necessary, I started looking for an alternative.

This seems to be suitable for what I need: tagging “home movies” for import into iTunes. It appears to cover all of the tags I’d care to use (except for “media kind”; see below), including the “Format” tag, which doesn’t appear to be accessible by other means (e.g. iTunes or MetaZ). The ability to directly tag .m4v files is useful, as I’ve otherwise been having Compressor output as .mp4 just so that I could tag, and then having to convert to .m4v in order to import into iTunes (also see below).

The app appears to enforce a media kind of “Movie”, regardless of any existing tag value (e.g. “Home Movie” for personal files/titles). It needs to be changed to respect the existing tag, while offering the option to change it to one of the standard iTunes values (e.g. Movie, Music Video, etc.). While it can be changed in iTunes, iTunes doesn’t write it back out to the original file - so if you share the file with someone else, they have to manually change that themselves, which seems to defeat the purpose of having this app. So… one star off for not being able to edit that tag (feature), but a second one off for not respecting the existing value and enforcing a different one in its place (bug).

While the app description reads “supports the iTunes friendly .mp4 and .m4v file formats”, an .mp4 file (read as: MPEG-4 container) can’t be opened in iTunes (12.4.3.1) - even if you right click, “Open with”, “Other”, and select iTunes directly. I’ve noticed that with other .mp4 files as well, even after directly output via Compressor and untouched by MetaMovie, so it may be an iTunes issue and not a MetaMovie issue. If so, the app description should be changed accordingly in order to not mislead users as to its capabilities.

UNSC Orac 117 about MetaMovie, v2.2.4