iFlicks Mac App REVIEW

Years ago, I had a strong interest in keeping my iTunes library organized. I spent hours looking up metadata and album artwork to fill in the blanks left by the many different sources of music and videos that were stored there. It’s been quite some time since I’ve tried to organize my iTunes library, but thankfully there are now apps to help with filling in the blanks. One such app for macOS is iFlicks.

DETAILS

iFlicks is a video and metadata handling system for macOS. It’s currently in its third iteration of the app (version 3.0.2) and was last updated on February 5, 2019. With this being the third major release of the app, there are some notable differences including:

• Processing videos containing HEVC content just as quick as H.264. You can also use iFlicks 3 to encode video tracks to HEVC.
• Creating custom presets with different settings from the built-in ones.
• A tweaked interface incorporating countless improvements like full Dark Mode support on macOS Mojave, as well as Touch Bar support for MacBook Pro.

iFlicks analyzes your video files and automatically finds metadata and poster artwork to make your files complete. It will then process the videos for iTunes or Plex so you can watch them on your media devices. In addition to adding metadata and artwork to your videos, iFlicks also offers support for custom presets, provides the ability to watch specific folders for new video files, is compatible with AppleScripts.

With iFlicks you can:

• Automatically look up Movie and TV Show metadata
• Find beautiful artwork, including squared artwork for TV Shows
• Automatically lookup subtitles and chapter titles

Powerful video processing provides:

• Extremely fast and lossless passthrough for H.264 and HEVC
• High-Quality encoding capabilities for H.264 and HEVC
• Dedicated presets for Apple Devices like iPhone, iPad and Apple TV
• HD support (HDR, 4k, 1080p, 720p)
• Encoding of Stereo and Surround Audio tracks
• Supports all common video formats like mkv, mp4, m4v, mov, avi, mpg and many many more
• Subtitle and Chapter support

USER EXPERIENCE

As I mentioned, I used to enter metadata by hand directly into iTunes. It was not a very user-friendly environment for that sort of task and iFlicks has already improved that process by leaps and bounds. Even if you end up having to fill in information by hand, it’s not nearly as torturous as iTunes used to be when you are using iFlicks’ interface. I really love the UI and the general layout of the app. It’s really intuitive and very easy to use.

To test out the strength of iFlicks, I added several videos that I had stored on a media drive. In total, I had 20 videos. I pulled them all into iFlicks for conversion. After analyzing the files, iFlicks was only able to work with 9 of the files. The warning stated that something was corrupt with the files and they couldn’t be converted. I removed those files from iFlicks and worked with the remaining 9 files. All the files, except one (Home Alone), were detected properly by iFlicks and labeled according to the app’s standards. I ended up searching for Home Alone’s information through the Internet (iMDB.com) and manually entering it into iFlicks. I did this so that when I exported the files out for iTunes, the metadata was present.

I’ve been using iFlicks 3 to help me complete the information for several movie files I’ve had for a long time but never bothered to add them to my iTunes library. I found the process to be very simple. Once I was happy with the metadata that was listed, I exported the files. You can change the preset you are using the export the videos out if you want. I used the preset that was meant for viewing videos in iTunes. It ended up taking the 9 video files about 5 minutes and 30 seconds to finish processing. I did have the option for files to automatically open import into iTunes turned on, but for some reason, they did not. Even though that small error happened, I was still able to drag and drop the files into iTunes and have no problems with them playing.

CONCLUSION

I really love how easy iFlicks makes this process and how good the product looks. It’s really a very impressive app and I can recommend it for its functionality. The only thing I don’t really recommend is the price. iFlicks 3 is currently $34.99 in the Mac App Store. It is a one-time price, but historically, iFlicks has released major releases as paid updates. As nice as this app is, I thought $35 was a little much to pay for something like this. Then again, I’m not constantly imported videos into media browsers and I don’t know if I would notice it being a huge help if I were doing that task on a regular basis.

For more information, iFlicksapp.com
Find iFlicks on Facebook and Twitter.

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Originally published at macsources.com on February 21, 2019.