Saturday, December 29, 2012

How to Increase Video Playback Speed On a Mac and iPad

For those of us who can take in information at a quicker rate than is normally available, increasing playback speed for videos is a wonderful tool. Here are two ways to do it, for both a Mac and also iPhone/iPad device.

1. On your Mac's OS. Use VLC to speed up videos easily. VLC is truly the greatest video player I have ever found, for either Mac or Windows, and it is %100 free. To make videos player faster on the Mac, press "Command" and "+" to speed up video, and "Command" and "-" [minus sign] to slow it down.
2. On an iPhone/iPad, simply download the app SpeedUpTV. All videos - whether in your TV, Movies or any other folder - will be available to be sped up by this app. The app was free when I got it, and is wonderful. 
> Alternatively,  you can always change your iTunes media to either podcast or iTunes U formats (right-click any media in your library, and change Media Kind appropriately), and those two will have speed-up features built-in in iOS 6.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

How to Add Media To iTunes When It Seems To Disappear

Today I spent a good two hours trying to add some videos to my iTunes account. Normally it is easy enough, but I had already deleted these videos and was re-adding them. Apparently iTunes 11.0.1 had some trouble with that.

Basically what happened was, I'd been trying to add the videos but kept getting a "Processing..." along with "Adding to iTunes" notification. The little blue bar went right along, but all that happened was, only a two of the files were being added. Considering I'd been trying to import 27 videos, having only two appear was quite annoying.

I was already sure the formats were compatible with iTunes, as they were h.264 encoded mp4's and m4v's. Furthermore, as I've already mentioned, the files had played fine in the past in iTunes 11.0.0.

So, here's how I'd approach the problem in the future:

  1. Use the "Search" function, and try several key words. If you find them but want to change the media kind, just do that with "More Info" via right-click.
  2. Now, for those 27 videos I finally added. I added their containing folder (for example, "M*A*S*H Season 1" to the appropriate (in this case, "TV Shows") folder, within the larger iTunes Media folder. 
    1. A brief note: To add your desired folder to the iTunes folder on a Mac, go to "Finder" > "Macintosh HD" > "Users" > Your User Name > "Music" > "iTunes" > "iTunes Media" and click "TV Shows," "Music," or whichever appropriate folder.
  3. Then, I went into the iTunes program itself, and went to "File" > "Add to Library" as usual. I found the folder as I left it, within the iTunes larger folder, and simply added all instances.