I do not make this claim lightly.

I had an epiphany tonight.

One of the problems that comes up when you have a bunch of movies on DVD, and some stuff in iTunes, and some downloaded videos on a server, is that it’s hard to browse everything you’ve got from one location – and I am not about to rip a couple thousand DVDs into iTunes just to see them there.

On the other hand, if you grab, say, a .jpg of a movie poster, and you throw it at ffmpeg like so:

ffmpeg -i tron.jpg tron.mp4

What you wind up with is a single-frame .mp4 file, and you can throw that into iTunes, and then you can give it a nice descriptive name, like “Tron (DVD)” to remind you, when you’re looking through your iTunes library, that you have Tron on DVD, and then you have all your physical media neatly sorted in with the media you only have on disk.

Here’s what the proof of concept looks like.  It’ll be a lot busier before I’m done with it.

Edit: Wow, I should have chosen a bunch of movies that would properly show off how obscure and l33t my movie collection was.  I think that including something like “27 Dresses” in this test run shows that I am actually very confident in my manliness.

That, and I didn’t remember whether iTunes put titles starting with a number at the beginning or end of a list and I wanted to find out.

I should drag out 8 really weird foreign movies and re-do this screenshot, but I think I’ll let it stand. 🙂