Every Day Is A School Day - Changing metadata on movie files ...

As per my earlier post: -

Sharing media libraries between Apple Macs - d'oh, I'm holding it wrong

I'm continuing to tinker with my media library, sharing between macOS, iOS, iPadOS and tvOS ...

One thing that was niggling me was that I had a series of media files, in the MP4 v2 [ISO 14496-14] format, aka .m4v, for which the metadata appeared to be wrong ...

The symptom for this was that, when I imported the .m4v files into my library, via TV.app on the macOS box that's sharing the library - an Apple Mini, the name of the media item, as shown with TV.app ( on that Mac or any other  device ) did NOT match my expectations.

As an example, I have a bunch of files: -

ls -1 Dinnerladies\ Season\ 2\ Episode\ *

Dinnerladies Season 2 Episode 1 - Catering.m4v

Dinnerladies Season 2 Episode 10 - Toast.m4v

Dinnerladies Season 2 Episode 2 - Trouble.m4v

Dinnerladies Season 2 Episode 3 - Holidays.m4v

Dinnerladies Season 2 Episode 4 - Fog.m4v

Dinnerladies Season 2 Episode 5 - Gamble.m4v

Dinnerladies Season 2 Episode 6 - Christmas.m4v

Dinnerladies Season 2 Episode 7 - Minnellium.m4v

Dinnerladies Season 2 Episode 8 - Christine.m4v

Dinnerladies Season 2 Episode 9 - Gravy.m4v

where the file name reflects the season, episode and name.

However, the episode names, as shown in TV.app, never reflected the filename ...

I spent a happy hour or two deleting/reimporting, but never managed to resolve it ...

And then I realised where I was going wrong ...

The file name is NOT the same as the episode name ...

TL;DR; this is stored in the file's metadata, which is more than just the file name itself ...

This metadata is shown via the [cmd][i] key sequence in Finder, and includes: -

Last opened

Dimensions

Codec

Colour profile

Title

Duration

Audio Channels

Yes, you've guessed it ... the Title did NOT NOT NOT match the filename

So how to change it ?

Even though [cmd][i] exposes the information, one cannot change it ...

So what do to ?

After a spot o' Googling, I found that the VLC media player CAN edit this metadata

I downloaded and installed VLC on the Mac mini, and ran through the affected .m4v files, updating the Title to reflect the filename ....

Having done this, I re-imported the files into my library and all is now good .....

VLC is my friend 👍👧👶😎