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Manage and Play Videos in iTunes

Coolness, thy name is iTunes. Now you can play QuickTime videos in iTunes. They can be QuickTime videos that you made or professional videos that you've downloaded from the iTunes Music Store.

Download videos from iTunes Music Store

The iTunes music store includes video with some songs or albums. Some albums also may include a Digital Bookleta PDF document that contains extra photos, music credits, and song lists. Look for a booklet icon or a video camera icon (shown below) next to song names in the Music Store. When you buy a song or album that includes either of these two extras, they're downloaded to iTunes along with the music you purchase.

These icons appear in your iTunes window after you've downloaded your music, as shown below. Double-click the video file to play it. The video plays in the bottom-left pane of the iTunes window (unless you set a different preference, explained on the next page). Click once on the video and it opens in a separate window, as shown at the top of the next page. Click the Full Screen button (circled below) to show the movie full screen.

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When you open a video in a separate window, you have access to the Play controls so you can place the playhead anywhere in the movie or scrub back and forth through your favorite scenes.

Control-click on the video's window to open a contextual menu from which you can change the movie size.

If you want to grab the video you downloaded from iTunes Music Store and copy it to another computer or onto a disc, you'll find it buried deep within your Home Folder's Music folder.

Import your own QuickTime videos

If you have a QuickTime movie that you exported from iMovie or that was imported into iPhoto from your digital camera, store them in iTunes and play them whenever you want, without having to search your hard disk for them. You can drag a QuickTime file from any location on your computer to the iTunes window to put it in the Library.

Create a video Smart Playlist

So videos will be easy to find, create a Smart Playlist whose condition says that "Kind contains QuickTime Movie" (shown to the right).

Set a default for video playback

When you select a video in the song list and click the Play button (or when you double-click a song to play it), it might play "in the main window" (the small video pane in the bottom-left corner of the window, as shown on the previous page), "in a separate window" (as shown above), or in "full screen" mode.

To set a default for how a video plays, open iTunes preferences, then click the "Advanced" button in the toolbar. Checkmark the "Play videos" option. From the pop-up menu, choose the way you want iTunes to initially show a video, then click OK.