iTunes was not originally designed with video playback in mind, but its recent versions have added the functionality to browse and enjoy your digital video files with the same ease and convenience with which iTunes handles your digital music. Now that the iTunes Music Store allows you to purchase music videos and TV shows, and now that video podcasts have become widely popular in the citizen-journalist world of blogging, iTunes has embraced video playback as a key feature that's every bit as critical to its success as its traditional digital music functions.
Playing videos in iTunes takes place in the Album Art and Video Viewer pane, which (if visible) appears at the bottom of the Source pane. If you so choose, videos can instead be shown in a separate and larger window, or in full-screen mode (taking over the entire area of your screen). With this range of playback options, iTunes can do things with your videos that your TV never could.
Select the Videos Source
Click Videos in the Source pane of the iTunes window. This view consists of a black background with icons representing your videos laid out in a grid, each one with a reflection underneath it and important information (such as its name, artist, and genre) next to it. If you don't have any videos yet, refer to 
Purchase a Song, Album, Video, or Audiobook from the iTunes Music Store or 
Put Your Home Movies and Downloaded Videos on Your iPod to add some videos to your iTunes Library.
Browse Videos by Thumbnails
The grid arrangement of the Videos view lets you see at a glance what each video contains. The thumbnail image, which iTunes automatically selects from the first few seconds of each video, tells you what kind of video it is and (in many cases) shows you a title screen that accurately represents the video's contents.
Tip
Many videos, particularly the ones you buy from the iTunes Music Store, have "poster frames" that the content creators set to be an ideal representative image for each video. In the case of videos you create or download from the Internet, a poster frame might not be set, and iTunes chooses one automatically. If you don't like the poster frame that iTunes chooses, you can add your own by taking an appropriate screenshot and using the technique described in 
Add Album Art to Songs. The first artwork image listed in the Artwork pane of the Get Info dialog box is the poster frame that iTunes uses for the video's thumbnail image.
At the top of the listing pane is a context bar similar to the one you get when you use the Search box to search for music. This video context bar is always present in Videos view, and it allows you to narrow the list of icons that are shown in the grid. For example, choose Movies from the left side of the bar to show only short films you bought from the iTunes Music Store, home movies you created, and videos you downloaded from Internet sources such as Google Video. Choose Music Videos to show only music videos you purchased, or choose Podcasts to show only episodes of video-based podcasts to which you've subscribed. (See 
Subscribe to and Listen to Podcasts for more information.)
The right side of the context bar is for use in conjunction with the Search box. If you specify a partial name in the Search box, only those videos that match what you've typed are displayed. Choose Artist, Album, or Title to limit the filtered search results to only the field you've chosen; choose All to allow iTunes to match any of the available fields to your search text. (Some kinds of videos contain specialized context fields that appear only when the specific genre selected on the left side contains those fields, such as Show for the TV Shows genre or Author for the Podcasts genre.)
Notes
The "genres" of videos are set permanently in each file's attributes and cannot be altered. The Genre field of a TV show episode is set to TV Shows by the iTunes Music Store. It will still come up under TV Shows even if you change the Genre field to something else (such as Comedy).
Mac users can try the Lostify website (http://home.comcast.net/~lowellstewart/lostify/) for help in updating these "hidden" info tags.
Browse Videos by Genre, Artist, and Album
The visual icon view of the Videos source is not the only way to browse your videos. If you prefer, you can use a list view similar to the one used for your digital music in the other media sources in iTunes. To access this view, click the List View icon at the right side of the context bar. (The Icon View button next to it returns you to the grid layout with the thumbnail icons.)
In the list view, you can organize your videos (indicated here and in the regular Library view with a "video" icon in the Name field) using most of the same columns that are available for your music. Videos have a few additional fields as well, such as Description (usually used for summarizing TV show and podcast episodes) and Show, Episode Number, and Season (used for grouping TV shows according to their release sequences, which don't exactly fit into the "album" and "genre" metaphors of digital music). If you organize this view using the Show column, the episodes of each TV show are listed in their release order, season by season, the way you likely want them to be sorted.
Tip
The order in which you sort your videos in list view carries over to icon view. If you sort your videos based on Year and then switch back to icon view, the icons are sorted on the Year field rather than alphabetically. This behavior does not occur if you use the context bar to filter only on TV Shows or Music Videos; it does occur if you're showing Movies, Podcasts, or All.
The context bar is available in list view and in icon view, and you can use it to specify individual sorting behaviors for your different genres of videos. Additionally, whether you're in list view or icon view, you can click the Browse button to activate the navigation lists, which you can use just like in any other media source to narrow the videos based on their Genre, Artist, or Album fields.
Play a Video in the Viewer Pane
Double-click a video to start playing it, or select it and click Play. The video begins playing in the Viewer pane at the bottom left of the screen. You can control playback using the Play/Pause button and the scrub bar.
If the Viewer pane is not displayed, you will hear the audio of the video playing but won't see anything. Activate the Viewer pane using the Show or Hide Viewer Pane button at the bottom of the Source column. Then you can adjust the size of the pane by clicking and dragging the vertical divider between the Source column and the main iTunes pane; the Viewer pane grows and shrinks to retain a square shape.
As with your digital music, the Viewer pane can show either the currently playing item or the artwork for the item that's selected. While a video is playing, if you select a different video, that video's artwork will appear in the Viewer pane instead of the playing video if the Viewer pane's header shows Selected Song. Click the header to change it to Now Playing to continue viewing the currently playing video.
Play a Video in a Separate Window
The Viewer pane might be too restrictive for viewing your favorite videos. Fortunately, it's not the only viewing method available in iTunes.
Click inside the Viewer pane to open a separate window showing its contents. If a video is currently playing in the Viewer pane, it will continue playing in the separate window, which you can then resize using the grip in the bottom-right corner until it's a size comfortable for viewing.
Note
Remember that if you pause playback of a song or video, select another item in the same listing, and then click Play, iTunes continues playing the original item, not the one you've currently selected. This can lead to confusion when playing videos. For example, if the Viewer pane is showing the Selected Song, you might click the artwork in a selected video to view it in a large separate window, and then click Play, only to hear the audio for a different video begin playing and no visible video appearing anywhere. This happens because the previously selected video is playing, and its video (which should be in the Viewer pane) is being hidden because the Viewer pane is in the wrong mode. To remedy this, close the separate artwork window and click the Viewer pane's header to switch it to Now Playing mode. Then click in the Viewer pane to open the video in a separate window. Close the window and double-click a different video to view it.
Play a Video Full-Screen
When a video is playing in the Viewer pane, you can click the Show Video Full Screen button to switch to full-screen mode, where the playing video takes over the entire screen, turning your computer into a TV so that you can watch your favorite TV shows from a chair across the room or show a TV program or Internet video for all your friends gathered around your computer. Click the mouse to cancel full-screen mode and return the video to the Viewer pane.
If the video is already playing in a separate window, you can't directly switch it to full-screen mode. Instead, close the separate window and then click the Show Video Full Screen button.
Configure the Way All Videos Should Be Played
Switching between these three video playback modes can be tedious and unpredictable unless you know exactly what you're doing. One way to ensure that your videos will behave more consistently is to define your preferred playback mode in the iTunes Preferences window.
Open the iTunes Preferences window. (Choose iTunes, Preferences on the Mac; choose Edit, Preferences in Windows.) Click the Playback tab. At the bottom of the window, choose your preferred playback method from the Play Videos drop-down list. Choose from in the main window (in the Viewer pane), in a separate window, and full screen.
Disable the Play videos check box if you want iTunes to suppress playback of video at all times, and instead to play only the audio portion of a video when you play it.
Click OK. From now on, each new video you play starts in the preferred viewing mode. You can switch to a different mode using the methods described earlier in this task.
Before You Begin
See Also
Create a Playlist
Find and Play Music in iTunes
Find and Play Videos on the iPod
Find and Play Videos in iTunes
