iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Playing Videos

Cranking up your iTunes movie theater is a lot like playing a song: Double-click on the title of the video you want to play and iTunes starts playing it. You can spot the video files in your Library by the small gray icon that looks like a TV screen next to their titles.

When you click on the Videos icon in the iTunes Source list, all of your movies, TV shows, and music videos are displayed together. You can use the last two icons on the Search bar (Section 5.2) to show your video collection, respectively, as a series of text titles or as a set of thumbnails giving you a little picture preview of the video’s contents.

With video, you get a few viewing options to choose from. You can play the video in the album artwork window, opt to have it open in a separate window floating above iTunes (see Figure 5-17), or you can watch it at full-screen size on your computer.

To pick your preferred screen size, open the iTunes preferences box at iTunes → Preferences → Playback (Mac) or Edit → Preferences → Playback (Windows). Make sure the checkbox next to “Play videos” is turned on and then make your decision with the drop-down menu.

You’re not stuck with that decision forever, though. Even if you choose to just have the video play in the album artwork window, you can pop it into its own floating window by double-clicking on the album artwork window as it plays. You can also expand it to full-screen size by clicking the full-screen button underneath the album artwork window, as shown ...