One thing that has annoyed me for the longest is not being able to play avi files or some other movie files in my itunes library. So I did some research and stumbled upon some cool and very simple things to make this happen.
The first thing you should do is download Perian , which is a open source component that adds support for several popular media files to quicktime. Also make sure you have quick time pro.
Now to the easy good stuff, select the avi or any other movie file you want to add to itunes and open it with quicktime. Now once it is open select file from the menu and make sure you save as a reference movie just like my example at the bottom.
This will save the movie as an reference file, which will be an mov. Just drag that file to itunes and edit all the meta tags and etc just like if it was a native file. This files reads the original file from anywhere on the hard drive and makes it possible for iTunes to play it. Also each of these reference files should be around 3 mb each.
As you can see from the picture below I have had way too much time on my hands adding my Entourage collection with this trick.
Another trick I have found that has made my life better is adding description tags to my favorite TV Shows and movies. It’s a very cool applescript that you will love, check it out here.
