Tip: How to Easily Categorize Videos in iTunes

I have been recently watching TV shows by downloading the video RSS feeds as Podcasts to iTunes. When downloading video podcasts, you will easily end up with a large number of video files stacked in one folder. This will make browsing complicated if you want to easily find a TV-show or movie from the iTunes database.

Fortunately there is a simple way to categorize video files in the iTunes library. Simply change the media kind of a video file to categorize video files in the iTunes. Follow these simple steps to change media kind of a video file:

1. Right hand click video file and choose “Get Info”
2. Click the “Options” tab
3. Change media kind and click OK
4. Video file will now be available in one of the libraries depending on your choice:
- Movies
- TV Shows
- Podcasts
- iTunes U
- Music Video

Although iTunes has quite limited selection of media kind categories, just use your imagination in grouping files. E.g. I store all the video files I download from Podcasts as follows:
- Movies (unwatched and archived movies)
- TV Shows (unwatched and archived TV Shows)
- Podcasts (unwatched and uncategorized e.g. news)
- iTunes U (archived special TV programs)
- Music Video (none at the moment)

This is particularly useful if you want to archive some of the video files and keep them in a separate category to newly downloaded TV shows.

This tip highlighted a useful feature in iTunes 8 and 9 that you can set the media kind in the options panel of the get info. It is very quick and easy to specify which video category each of your media files belong to make your iTunes video library more manageable and user friendly.