Tag Archives: Apple arrogance

Apple: Workaround to get video titles on iOS7 devices

Have videos that you want on iOS7? If you don’t have boxart for every video you own – and I for one always make box art of the videos I take of my son – then you are going to be pissed at iOS7: they stopped putting text labels on videos in the video player. It’s funny too because I noticed this happen back in 2010 with iOS4, when TV Shows stopped showing titles, but it’s only with iOS7 that it started causing problems for a lot more people. At least there’s a workaround.

In iTunes, if you want a video to show up with it’s text title on your device, select the video file in question, then right click and select Get Info. Select the Options tab and change the Media Type to Home Movie. Now sync your device. In the on-device Video app, you’ll see that there’s a new group called Home Video: in there you’ll have a list of your videos with *gasp* names under them!

Sad that there needs to be a workaround for this bug. And I’m calling it a bug. There’s no reason at all why the code can’t check for box art and make a decision based on whether or not it’s there. iTunes downloaded content wouldn’t suffer from this issue if they didn’t shove a piece of box art into the file: they don’t show you a thumbnail from a film and make you guess what video it is… Amazon does something similar with Kindle, but at least they show you a default bit of cover art with the name of the file when you copy over personal documents. This is like “if you didn’t get it from iTunes, that’s your problem.” The code should be checking for box art and if it doesn’t have a file, it should be displaying the name from the metadata, plain and simple.

Praised be the workaround.