Movies in itunes - why is it so difficult??

Hey guys, How's it going?

I have a question that I'm hoping you guys will know an answer for or at least tell me if it's possible.

From various places, I've managed to collect a library of movies... as I'm sure we all have. I've got about 130 all in avi format. OK, I know I need to convert these into Mp4 for itunes to import them (Handbrake??), but my problem is this...

How do I make itunes look for video's on an external HD whilst keeping the music on my imac? All up, I've got about 300gb of music, TV shows, music..etc... so this is not something I want on my imac as it's HD isn't that big.. I don't mind moving the entire library to an external, but then how do I get TimeMachine to back this up too? (very protective of my music collection!!)

All I want to do is get everything into itunes so I can stream to my TV and have everything in FrontRow....

any help would be cool!!!

Cheers
Mactard

Hey Mactard,

Welcome to the forum!

Hidden in the advanced options of iTunes is a little preference called 'Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to the library'. This will be great for you, however it will mean that you'll have to think a bit when adding stuff to the iTunes library!

If you uncheck it then iTunes will keep the original file where it is, rather than copy across to the iTunes folder. However if you move the file, change the name of the file, or delete the file then iTunes will go a little squibbly* if you try and play it (error message saying where has the file gone?).

* Yes that is a technical term