When I was spring cleaning through my music collection the other day and updating all of my music and ripped CD’s with the appropriate album artwork when it occurred to me that the majority of my video media did not have its own artwork. I use a 32GB Zune HD and like many other PMP’s, it shows a thumbnail of the video clip about 30-45 seconds into the video by default. I was wondering if I would be able to do what I do with audio files to my video files for adding artwork both in Windows 7 and on the Zune HD.
I tried everything I could think to try and inevitably came to what everyone does when they need to do something and doesn’t know how, I googled exactly what I was trying to do, word-for-word. After sifting through the usual amount of articles and posts which offered little to no help, I stumbled on a program called AudioShell.
AudioShell is a great add-on because it doesn’t exactly add a program to your computer, but instead adds a few more tabs in the right-click properties menu of a file. These new tabs allow the user to add and change ID3 metadata tags without the use of a third party program like Mp3tag. Best of all, while it is essentially made for editing information on audio files, it will allow users to edit tag information on certain video formats.
After installation, simply find an accepted video file. In my case, this would be an .mp4 file that I ripped from a Blu-ray disc.
Note: The movies posters were already added to these files.
Right-click on the file and select Properties.
Click on the AudioShell Tag Editor menu tab and select Add Cover.
Navigate to the movie poster file which you saved in advance and click Apply.
Note: After clicking Ok or Apply, it takes a minute for the system to add the picture to the file and show as the thumbnail. The properties window even said “Not Responding”, but eventually worked fine.
These are the supported file types by AudioShell taken from the AudioShell website.
- mp3 (all ID3 tag versions)
- wma, asf and wmv (including DRM protected files)
- Apple iTunes and iPod aac (m4a, m4b, m4v and m4p) and mp4 files
- ogg, flac (vorbis comment tags)
- mpc, mp+ (APE/APEv2 tags)
- monkey’s audio (APE/APEv2 tags)
- wav pack (APE/APEv2 tags)
- optim frog (APE/APEv2 tags)
- wav (ID3v2 tag in ‘tag ‘ RIFF chunk)
As you can see, this is a great way to organize your videos and make them look very nice when viewing through an explorer window. The down side is that the accepted formats do not include .avi and some other prominent file types. Let me know what you think of AudioShell and if anyone has found a similar program to add artwork to .avi files, please let me know in the comments.
Courtesy: http://windows7news.com/2010/04/08/windows-7-utilities-audioshell/
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