import

Everywhere I looked people were recommending the use of either Handbrake, VisualHub or iSquint to make videos iTunes compatible. They all work but require fiddling with settings, iTunes hackery and obviously aren’t from Apple. One would be forgiven for thinking that Apple didn’t approve of this sort of importing given that these tools existed for this very purpose. Little did I know QuickTime has been exporting to iTunes forever, making it possible to convert downloaded movies into iTunes compatible formats so you can load them onto your favorite Apple device. However, this export option has always required the Pro license of QuickTime. At least that was the case until Snow Leopard and QuickTime X.

In Snow Leopard the plain old QuickTime Player has a Share menu which lets you export any video that QuickTime can read into iTunes formats for iPod/iPhone, Apple TV and “Computer”. The shared videos are added to your media library and can then be synced with whatever device you choose.

Three easy steps:

1. Open the video you downloaded in QuickTime X
2. Click on the Share menu and select iTunes…
   
3. Choose the output format of your choice, keep in mind QuickTime will not scale your movie up, so your choices are limited based on the current resolution of the movie. You’ll find that only True HD movies (1080p+) can be exported to Computer format. Don’t worry about it, just choose the best option it gives you.
   

That’s it! Nice and easy.

For those interested in the actual output resolutions, the answer is it depends on the source resolution. By and large the iPhone/iPod size will try to constrain the width to 640 pixels. Apple TV will attempt to get close to 720p and Computer will attempt to get close to 1080p.