How to Convert and Add Personal Videos to iTunes

Overall iTunes is great for watching videos and keeping them organized, especially seeing as most of the movies or TV shows that you purchase on the iTunes store are added automatically. However the same can’t be said of your personal videos – including any videos you bought or downloaded from elsewhere, or home movies you may have recorded.

The good news is that you can certainly add personal videos to iTunes – provided they are in the right format. That is why you need to know how to convert and then add the videos to iTunes:

1. Transcode the video to an iTunes-friendly format

Unfortunately iTunes doesn’t really support many formats, so it is more than likely you’ll have to convert your video even if it is in a popular format such as AVI, MKV or WMV.

The formats that iTunes does support are MOV, MP4 or M4V with video codecs in MPEG-4 or H.264, and audio codecs in AAC.

To transcode the video you’ll need a video converter, and for example you could use Movavi Video Converter and follow the steps at: http://www.movavi.com/support/how-to/how-to-convert-and-transfer-video-to-iTunes.html.

2. Add the video to iTunes

The easiest way to add a video to iTunes is to simply drag the file to the open iTunes window and drop it there. Alternatively you could open the ‘File’ menu, click ‘Add to Library’ then browse and select the video and click ‘Open’.

By default the steps above will leave the video in its current location, but just list it in the iTunes library. If you want it to be copied over to the iTunes media folder you will need to check the ‘Copy files to the iTunes Media folder when adding to library’ setting under ‘Edit’ then ‘Preferences’ and in the ‘Advanced’ section.

3. Check the video has been successfully added 

To make sure your video was added to iTunes, open up the ‘Movies’ section and select the ‘Home Videos’ tab. The video should appear in that section, and if it does not then either something went wrong when adding the video – or it was not in a compatible format.

4. Move the video into the category that you want

As a final (but entirely optional) step, you can change the category that the video you added is stored in. All you need to do is right-click the video and select ‘Get Info’ then click on the ‘Options’ tab and adjust the ‘media kind’ list. The list should contain various categories that correspond to the tabs under the ‘Movies’ section of iTunes.

As you can see the most complicated part about adding movies to iTunes is simply making sure that it is in the right format. The rest of the process is actually very straightforward, and can be done in no time at all. In fact assuming you already have some personal videos that you’d like to add to iTunes – why not go ahead and try it out right now to see how it works.

This is a guest post.