What is it?

Magic Media Marker's is a tool to automate the processing of video files to make them nice in iTunes or TV.app and on your Apple Devices. Feed Magic Media Marker a video file and it will automatically determine if the file is a TV Show or a Movie by it's file name and download the appropriate metadata and artwork for you. Magic Media Marker is designed to be a “set it and forget it” kind of App needing no user interaction.

Now runs natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs!


Magic Media Marker Icon

Features:

  • Transcode video files by itself, or by controlling HandbrakeCLI
  • Remux MKV files with h264 video
  • Adds all meta data to Movies and TV Shows
  • A completely automated system for preparing your videos for TV.app, iTunes and iDevices.
  • Let Display Maid automatically restore window positions when a display is connected/disconnected.
  • Create profiles and save mutilple window position sets.

User Guide



General Preferences for Magic Media Marker

General Preferences:

Show Progress in Menu Bar.

If this option is checked, and time Magic Media Marker is processing a video file it will replace the marker icon in the menu bar with progress information. Uncheck this if menu bar space is limited.

Change color of Menu Bar to indicate errors.

If this option is checked, the marker icon in the menu bar will change from black to red if metadata for the video file couldn’t be found. The log tab can be checked for additional information.

Ignore Video Files Less Than...

You can set a file size limit here and MMM will ignore and video files with a size under your specified limit. This can be useful if your movie files come with a small sample video for quality display purposes.

Watched Folder

Chose, and turn on a watched folder here. When activated, the watched folder will be scanned and it’s contents will be ignored. Any new video files added to the folder after that point will be picked up and processed automatically. It is not advised to select your entire iTunes Library for your watched folder.

Conversion Preferences:

File Conversion Prefs for Magic Media Marker
Remux mkv files when possible.

Magic Media Marker has the ability to strip video out of an mkv container, convert the audio if needed, and put it all back together in a m4v container that Apple's devices can read. This is called remuxing, not only does it save time over converting files, but it also avoids any quality loss since it is not transcoding the video. MKV files must use H264 video encoding to be remuxed

Move original files to trash.

This only effects files that are converted. After conversion the original file will be moved to the trash.

Conversion Settings:

Choose conversion settings for TV Shows and Movies. "Standard" settings will convert video files, without downsampling the video so they are compatible with newer Apple Devices (iPhone, iPad, Apple TV). "Universal" Settings will downsample video files so they are compatible with a wider range of devices. If Magic Media Marker uses HandBrakeCLI for video conversions you may add whatever custom settings you would like by clicking the "Edit Settings" button. Simply give the new setting a name, and then enter the command line string you would use with HandBrakeCLI leaving out the -i {input} -o {output} flags.


File Handling Preferences:

File Handling Prefs for Magic Media Marker
Media Folder Location

Select the location to move finishes video files to. iTunes & TV.app have their own watch folders that will add video files to their respective library. Fursther instructions are provided in the options window.

Remove watched shows from iTunes/TV.app.

This option will make Magic Media Marker look for TV Shows that have been watched, but not given a rating, and remove them from your iTunes/TV.App library. The referenced files will be moved to the trash, but the trash will not be emptied. This allows you to have some TV Shows automatically be removed, while other can be kept by having a rating applied to them.

TV Show Database for Magic Media Marker

TV Show Database:

The local TV Show database only holds very basic show information. This is designed to keep Artwork for TV Shows so it does not have to be re-downloaded every time a new episode is processed.

If you find you don’t like the artwork that has been automatically chosen, you can drag and drop new artwork to this window.

If you find Magic Media Marker has accidentally chosen the wrong TV Show (Perhaps it grabbed the original Battlestar Galactica when you wanted the new one) you can look up the proper show ID from themoviedb.org and update that here. Now future episodes will be tagged with episode information from the correct series.

You can also give a series a rating from 1 to 5 stars. This is handy if there are some shows you’d like to keep, and others that you might want to have automatically removed once they have been watched.

Hit the “Save Edits” button and the next time a TV Show is processed it will use this new data when looking up information for the next episode.

Tips & FAQs:

What kinds of Metadata does Magic Media Marker support:
Right now Movies will receive Artwork, Title, Synopsis, Genre, Release Date, Content Rating, and Cast and Crew information.
TV Shows receive Artwork, Season Number, Episode Number, Episode Title, Synopsis, Genre, Content Rating, and Optional User Star Rating.

What Video formats does Magic Media Marker support:>
For metadata tagging .m4v and .mp4 files are supported. For non-m4v videos Magic Media Marker will also convert .avi, .wmv, .mkv, & .mpg videos so they can be tagged with metadata and play on iPods, iPhones, iPads, and AppleTVs.

Naming Convention:
Magic Media Marker analyses a video’s file name to extract the data it needs to properly look up the required information for that video. Magic Media Marker currently expects the video’s name to follow a certain naming convention. If you find a popular naming convention that is not supported please drop us a line and we’ll do out best to support it.

For Movies:

A Movie Name.mp4
A Movie Name 2011.mp4 (Adding a release year will help for movies that have remakes or sequels)
A.Movie.Name.2011.mp4

For TV Shows:

TV Show Name S01E01.mp4
TV Show Name 1x01.mp4
TV.Show.Name.S01E01.mp4
TV.Show.Name.1x01.mp4
Daily.TV.Show.2012.04.23.mp4