Using ffmpeg to modify iTunes specific metadata

Question

I'm currently trying to use ffmpeg to modify .mp4 file metadata. I can ffmpeg to set metadata tags like "Title" and "Genre", but I'm trying to access specific fields that iTunes accesses when displaying files, such as the "Starring", "Producers", and "Studio" fields.

Upon inspecting a file that already has that metadata with ffprobe, I see the "iTunEXTC" and "iTunMOVI" fields which hold a rating, and a dictionary with the cast, dirctors, producers, respectively. However, trying to modify those fields with ffmpeg the same way as the title and genre fields cause a hangup where nothing happens. Is there an easy way to modify these fields? Or is there another command line tool I can use to do so?

Thanks

Answer 1

I do this exact thing all the time and use kid3 (still using version 3.3.2 because this is all I use it for).

I started using it to be able to add the "Long Description" tag when the iOS TV app stopped displaying the "Description" field. But, after I started using it, I figured I might as well start adding the iTunes tags as well.

The iTunes tags won't show up in the drop down menu (like "Long Description" does) when you click "Add" because it's not a standard tag. But the menu is writable so you can just type the iTunes tag name you want to add.

Answer 2

I know this post i old, but never the less I found it searching same question. If You own a Mac the problem is very easy to solve. Just install the free app Subler (Subler dosn't exist for anything else but Mac). It can manipulate all relevant metadata for iTunes.app / Music.app / Video.app. I've fixed all my tagging for all music, musicvideo, audiobooks, homevideo, movie and tv-show files on my system. Also Subler is able to manipulate video (if it is in h264 (mpeg2 will be bypassed)) and convert all audioformats I've met in video-files. You can add, convert, delete and switch places (by importing to new file). Subtitles also was a problem before I found Subler. Subler can OCR subs from DVD and Blu-Ray (using Tesseract). If You've got a .srt-file it can add it as Tx3g. It can also batch-convert a bunch of files with same simple tag-correction. All You have to do is in preferences to make a "set" where You define wether you want to keep old metatags or not. You can the add the tags You wish i.e. Rating and deffine it as 'G' and add Content Rating deffine it as Clean. in Queue setting Click 'Optimize' and a lot of other interesting options and run the queue. Volá You've just corrected 240 video files only touching 2 tags in ItunEXTC.

Have a nice day and keep on computing.