Relocating and Expanding your iTunes Library

Files today are constantly getting bigger and your iTunes Library is no exception. Ever since the introduction of videos to the iTunes Store, people’s hard drives are getting filled with full length feature films, Television Shows, and Video Podcasts. Not to mention getting your DVD stash onto your Apple TV or iPod. If you are running out of space on your computer’s hard drive, this is the article for you. All you need is a FireWire hard drive and some time to import movies.

Step 1: Finding the right hard drive

Videos encoded for iPods take up about 300 MB per hour. Not to mention the space it takes for full quality on your Apple TV. If you plan on running your iTunes Library off of an external drive, firewire is definitely required. A 250GB hard drive can hold around 560 videos in iPod format if each of your videos were around an hour and a half. The more videos you have, the bigger the hard drive and price tag.

Step 2: Moving your already imported videos and music to your hard drive

First, open up iTunes and go to the iTunes menu, then Preferences. Traverse to the Advanced tab and locate the section titled “iTunes Music folder location”. This is the path iTunes uses to save and organize your library. The default path is (Macintosh HD/Users/username/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music). Using the Finder, navigate to your iTunes folder. Once there, go to the iTunes Music folder, then the Movies folder. Here is where your already encoded videos are stored. Get back into the iTunes Preferences window with the Advanced tab highlighted. Click the “Change” button. Locate your external hard drive and create a new folder in its main directory. This can be called anything but we’ll call it “iTunes”. Hit the “Choose” button and press okay to the up-and-coming dialog box asking you if you would like to keep your Library organized. Relaunch iTunes. Don’t worry, your library isn’t gone. iTunes is just focusing toward your external hard drive.

Switch back into the finder and find your movies folder which we located earlier. Select all of you movies (Apple + A) and drag them onto the “Movies” section of iTunes located in the top left corner. Once iTunes has finished importing your videos, feel free to import your music library as well. iTunes organizes your music in folders with the names of the artists. Import your music by dragging your files in and organizing them into playlists. Right now you are just making a copy of your library on your external hard drive. Once you have it just the way you like it, move on to the next step to learn how to import your DVD collection.

Step 3: Importing your DVD collection

There are multiple ways to do this however I found that the most effective way to do this is to use MediaFork. MediaFork is designed for importing your DVDs into QuickTime files. You can find MediaFork here. Once you have MediaFork in your Applications folder (or wherever you put it), Open it up and insert your first DVD. Choose to access your DVD and not a folder. Wait until MediaFork scans your DVD for the titles and tracks.

MediaFork automatically finds the longest title and selects it with all of the chapters included. The longest title is usually your feature length film. Under this section is the Destination section. Here you can tell MediaFork were to put your video. To make things easier, export it into a new folder in the root directory of your external hard drive. Simply exporting and encoding to your “Movies” folder doesn’t work. Once you’ve named and chosen a location for your movie, go down to the Output Settings section. Make sure the File format is “MP4 file”. This goes a lot quicker however, it takes up more space. Codecs should be set to “MPEG-4 Video/AAC Audio”. Now comes the part where you have to decide whether you are importing your video for your iPod, or importing your video for your Apple TV.

Importing Videos to your iPod

If you are importing your DVD to your iPod, make sure the Average bit rate is between 400 and 700. To find out if it is or not, click on the “Video” tab and go to the “Quality” section. The higher the bit rate, the better looking your video, but the longer it takes to encode. Also make sure that the Encoder is “FFmpeg”.

Click on the “Picture Settings” button. If you plan on using your iPod to show video on a television, check the “Keep aspect ration” box and change the width to 720. If you are just going to watch the video on the iPod’s screen, check he “Keep aspect ratio” button and make the width 320. All that’s left to do is click the big “Rip” button.

Importing Videos to your Apple TV

To import videos for the Apple TV, you do the same exact thing except this time you probably want to make the video at least 720 by 400. A smaller video will end up even more pixelated and unwatchable. Apple TV does support the 720p high-definition standard however there isn’t any video available at the moment.

Once you’ve imported your videos, simply drag them onto the “Movies” section in the top left corner.

Tada! Now you can sync your iPod/Apple TV and get rid of the previous library freeing tons of space on your internal hard drive.