Playing videos

This tutorial is mainly concerned with video playback, but the same methods can also be used to playback audio within the iTunes interface. This is different from the audio background tutorial in that the music plays in iTunes' interface and can be paused and played and controlled using the standard iTunes interface.

The first thing to do is to properly prepare your video. The easiest way to do so is by using Quicktime 7 Pro or Quicktime X, but there are other ways. Since iTunes LPs are created for HD resolution (1280x720) it's best to output your videos with the same properties. This means 1280 x 720 progressive video either at 25 or 29.97 frames per second, depending on your source footage.

When you open your HD video in Quicktime you can simply select Export and choose the AppleTV export profile. This should give you adequate quality 720p video material that you can easily use in your iTunes LPs.

When playing videos from within your iTunes LP you will be supplying iTunes with the artist, album and title of the video which should be displayed in the iTunes interface. However it's still a good idea to tag your video properly. To do so drag it into your iTunes window. It should probably appear in your Movies section. Set it's artist, album and title, and set the Video Kind to music video. Then right click the file and select Find in Finder or Find in Explorer on Windows computers. You can now copy your correctly tagged video file to your iTunes LP project.

To play such a video embedded within your iTunes LP you can use the window.iTunes.play function:

function playVideo() {
	window.iTunes.play("videos/videodemo.m4v", {title: "Video Demo", artist: "iTunesLP.net", album: "Video"});
}

After the playback has finished the user is returned to the exact same state in which the html page was left.

Example files

To try this out immediately download the example project for this tutorial. It contains a free sample video that you can use to experiment, along with the code to make this work.