When you download a movie from the iTunes store and view it in Front Row, it contains a wealth of metadata about the movie (e.g. director, actors, year, plot summary). This information does not appear for movies you rip yourself from DVDs.

This information can be automatically "scraped" from internet data sources in other media center applications like XBMC, but iTunes doe not appear to have this ability. I know that some of this data can be added manually to iTunes using "Get info" but I cannot find the fields for actors, producer, rating etc.

Any ideas?

When you download a movie from the iTunes store and view it in Front Row, it contains a wealth of metadata about the movie (e.g. director, actors, year, plot summary). This information does not appear for movies you rip yourself from DVDs.

This information can be automatically "scraped" from internet data sources in other media center applications like XBMC, but iTunes doe not appear to have this ability. I know that some of this data can be added manually to iTunes using "Get info" but I cannot find the fields for actors, producer, rating etc.

Any ideas?

You need something like MetaX, which can scrape IMDb (and also a pretty good database of user-provided info) and insert it into the MP4/MOV file. For some reason it crashes a bit on my system when editing multiple files, but it doesn't look like other people have had that problem, and when it works for me it's great.

Thanks, peterjcat, I will try it.

does this work with video_ts folders? or is there something else that will?

I downloaded MetaX but cannot get it to work so far. I can open a movie in the app, and then it is supposed to automatically search for metadata, but it just sits there. I haven't had time to fool around with prefs and settings, but any suggestions appreciated from those with more experience. My internet connection is working fine, by the way.