Watch Movies and TV Shows in the TV App

The new TV app replaces the Movies, TV Shows, and Home Movies libraries that were in iTunes, and corresponds to its equivalent apps on iOS and on the Apple TV. You can use it to buy and rent movies and TV shows, and view video content from your own library.

For many people, the TV app will be nothing more than a conduit to access videos streamed from different services: Apple’s iTunes Store offerings, of course, and it’s Apple TV+ service, due to launch in late 2019, but also a number of channels accessible via the TV app, such as HBO, Showtime, and Starz. The comparable TV app on the Apple TV offers more content, through apps that can be downloaded to that device.

Browse Content in the TV App

The TV app has five tabs at the top of the window: Watch Now, Movies, TV Shows, Kids, and Library. (Figure 65)

Figure 65: The Watch Now tab of the TV app.
Figure 65: The Watch Now tab of the TV app.

Here is what these tabs present:

  • Watch Now: This tab shows a poster frame of the last movie or TV show episode you’ve watched, along with an Up Next list below it, of content that you have recently watched or added to your library.

  • Movies: Here you can find movies available to purchase or rent from Apple’s offering, as well as from channels that you can subscribe to.

  • TV Shows: This tab presents TV shows available to purchase or rent.

  • Kids: This tab shows content appropriate for children, though not sorted by age.

  • Library: Here you can access movies, TV shows, and home movies that you have purchased from Apple, or that you have added to your library manually. The Library view contains a sidebar which lets you access your library by type of content, genre, and in playlists. (Figure 66)

Figure 66: Movies in my library.
Figure 66: Movies in my library.

You can browse your library using the sidebar: you can see recently added items, movies, TV shows, and items in 4K & HDR, home videos, and downloaded items, which includes videos that you have added to your library manually.

Add Videos to Your TV Library

In addition to videos that you purchase from the iTunes Store, you can add your own videos to your library. These may be videos that you have ripped from DVDs or Blu-Rays, videos that you have purchased without DRM, or videos that you have filmed yourself. These must be files that have .mp4, .m4v, or .mov extensions. Ripping DVDs is not complicated, though it may be illegal in your country, and it requires third-party software.

You can also rip Blu-ray discs, if you have an external Blu-ray drive connected to your Mac. See this article by Rob Griffiths, Revisiting ripping Blu-ray discs.

To add videos to your TV library, drag them from the Finder to the Library section of the sidebar. The TV app will put all such videos into the Home Videos section, but you can change this by adjusting the videos’ tags.

Click Home Videos in the sidebar, then click a video to select it and press ⌘-I. You see an info dialog, similar to that in the Music app (Figure 67).

Figure 67: You can edit tags for your videos in this window.
Figure 67: You can edit tags for your videos in this window.

As you can see above, the fields in this dialog are labeled with terms such as title and director. Depending on how you created or downloaded our video, it may contain some metadata, or none at all. So fill in the fields for title, director if you wish, choose a genre, and add a year if you want. In the Artwork tab, you can drag a cover or poster image for your video.

One important change to make is in the Options tab. From the Media Kind menu, choose Movie, if you want the TV app to group your video in the Movies library; choose TV Show, if you want it to be grouped with other TV shows; or leave it as Home Video, if it is that type of video. Click OK to save any changes you’ve made in the info dialog.

For more information about tagging files, see Tag Your Music Files. While this discusses tagging music files in the Music app, the procedure is similar; the names of some of the tags are different.

View Videos in the TV App

To view a video in your library, hover your pointer over its artwork and click the Play button. The video starts playing full screen on your Mac. Playback controls are the same as I described earlier in Watch Music Videos. You can pause your videos at any time, and if you stop watching, when you return to a video it will pick up where you last paused.

You can view your video in a standard window by choosing View > Exit Full Screen or return to full screen from a standard window by choosing View > Enter Full Screen (the keyboard shortcut for both of these is ⌘-Control-F). And you can use picture-in-picture mode to shrink your video to a thumbnail by moving your pointer over the window to display the play controls at the bottom of the window and clicking the Picture in Picture icon. Clicking the similar icon on the minimized video returns it to full size.

Organize Videos in the TV App

As you grow your library, you may want to organize your movies and TV shows. The TV app’s sidebar shows genres, so if you apply the appropriate tags to your files, you’ll be able to find them by clicking one of the genres in the sidebar.

You can also create playlists, both regular playlists where you add items manually, or smart playlists, which use tags and other information about the videos to group them. The process is similar to that of creating playlists in the Music app; see Organize Your Music and Create Playlists for more on creating playlists.

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