[danbt79]

Hope someone has a solution for this - someone could save me a ton of time!

Ok - I just picked up a PowerMac G5 (£180 - how good is eBay!?) to replace my PowerBook as my main mac. My Powerbook had an external firewire drive hung off it that holds all my media. This has a lot of movies and TV shows on it that are in my iTunes library. I added all these movie files to iTunes as follows:

Open the movie in Quicktime from the external drive, save it as a referenced movie and then import that referenced movie to iTunes. End result is that all the movies are in my Library, they play from the external drive and it doesn't matter what format they are in as if QuickTime can open them, I can save them as an iTunes friendly format referenced movie. (This is a good tip by the way!)

Now - I've just copied my iTunes library to the new PowerMac, plugged in the firewire drive and *boom* the movies show up in iTunes and work great - don't ya love macs?! So far so good - here's where I hit my problem....

I'm getting a 500Gb second hard drive for the PowerMac to store all my media, and I intend on using the firedrive for Time machine. I'm going to copy all the movies to the new internal drive and import them directly to iTunes - no mucking about with referenced quicktime .mov's.
You following so far?
The problem is that I have a lot of ID3 information for these movies that I've built up over time, and this won't show up when I reimport the movies as the ID3 information is stored in the referenced mov's that I'm going to be trashing.

Is there any utility or script or other method that I can use to copy the ID3 information from one movie/tv show to another? I've looked everywhere and can't find anything on google or here.

Hope someone can help with my (niche) problem! Sorry for the length...!

[danbt79]

In case anyone turns this up in a search here's the solution I've settled on:

I imported all the referenced mov files into iTunes. I dragged the actual movie files across to the movie folder on my new, primary drive. On a hope and a prayer, I tried to view one of the movies in my iTunes library, and sure enough a little dialogue popped up saying it can't find the contained movie data (my external drive being unplugged of course).

However, lo and behold, after a few seconds iTunes managed to locate the movie in it's new location and everything plays fine. How cool is that??! Just open each of your movies once, and iTunes will track down where you moved them to!