Adding your Personal Movies (or DVDs) to your iTunes Library

On a previous post I showed you how to rip (or burn) your personal DVD collection to your computer. Now I am going to show you how to add those movies (or any other movie file) into your iTunes Library so that you can stream them through Apple TV, or upload them to your iOS device.

On my instructions below I will be mainly using Mac OS X terminology, but doing this in Windows is exactly the same, except some of the option names I will mention are called something different.

Storage Setup

Movies typically take up a lot of room on a hard drive. So as you organize your movie library, keep this in mind. If you have a small movie library, storing the movie files in your computer's hard drive is the way to go, but if you have a large library, or if you don't have a lot of hard drive space, you may want to consider purchasing an external hard drive to store your movies in.

Once you have decided where to store the movie files, and you have copied the movies to that location, it is time to add them to iTunes.

iTunes Preferences

Before you add the movie files to iTunes, you have to understand one very important setting in the iTunes Preferences.

Navigate to iTunes > Preferences... then select the Advanced tab. This tab contains a very important option. The "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" option.

When this option is checked, anytime you import a new movie file into iTunes, the file will automatically be copied into the location of the iTunes Media folder. For most users, that folder is located in your main hard drive. So, if you want to store your movie files in your main hard drive, this option needs to be checked.

However, if you choose to store your movie files on an external hard drive (or some other location other than the iTunes Media folder), you have to uncheck this option.

So set that option depending on how/where you want your movie files stored.

Once you have decided on that option, it's time to move your files into iTunes.

Adding Movie Files to iTunes

Adding your movie file to iTunes is as simple as click and drag.

- In iTunes, select the Movies library. Depending on which version of iTunes you are running, that may be done either of these two ways:

- Now find your movie files in Finder, select them, and drag/drop them into iTunes. If you have more than one movie, select them all and drag/drop them all at the same time.

- Your movies should now show up in iTunes Movies library, inside the Home Videos tab.

- Home Videos is not where I like to keep my movies, so I move them to the Movies tab. To do that, select all the movies and right-click. Then select the Get Info option.

- In the Get Info window, select the Options tab. In there change the Media Kind option from Home Video to Movie (or TV Show if that's what you are importing).

- Note that the Get Info windows has several tabs that let you change lots of information about your movie. You can even load the movie poster or DVD cover.

- Now your movie(s) are in iTunes and located in the correct place. You can now stream them through Apple TV, add them to an iOS device, or play them directly on your computer.