Overzealous iTunes podcast organization
My iTunes library seems to collect all sorts of media from all sorts of places. I try to keep it fairly clean, so when I noticed I had a number of neglected video podcasts I set to work. Some video podcasts weren’t interesting enough to warrant keeping around, and some weren’t actually podcasts but rather one-off files packaged in feeds anyway. For example, I had downloaded Rob Carlton’s dry and witty “CARMICHAEL & shane” via an sidebar-ed iTMS link. I wanted this file to show up as a nice thumbnail in the “Movies” section, instead of being nested under “Podcasts”. So I dragged the file to another folder, deleted the podcast, and re-imported the video file into iTunes — only to find it back where it started, under podcasts again!
Long story (including a trip into Hex Fiend to replace all instances of “podcast” into “nodcast”) short, it turns out the Quicktime container that it was in (.mp4/.m4v) contains a bit of metadata which flags the file as a podcast, and another piece containing the feed URL. Lostify does not (yet, anyway) have a way to change these flags, but its underlying utility, AtomicParsley, does. A quick AtomicParsley VideoName.mp4 --podcastFlag false in Terminal, a little time spent thinking, and it spit out a second file with a random “-temp-12345″ infixed into the name. Voilà! “CARMICHAEL & shane” is now a first class movie!