The old videos you see might only be reference listings. Click on them and see if they play or not. Most likely a ? will appear designating iTunes cannot find them. Unless, the video files were added to iTunes list without actually being added to its library or vice-versa. ie: the old videos might either be in iTunes Library folder on your Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or maybe in LW's download folder or other location on your computer. Another way to check if they still exist is to right-click (control-click) one of the video files listed in iTunes and choose 'Show in Finder'.

Sometimes we forget to set iTunes to copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding files to Library. I've made that error once in a while before realising. ie: iTunes preferences -> Advanced.

As for your other video files, did you drag and drop the video files into iTunes or simply place the video files within the iTunes folder on the HDD?

Are you looking in the Movies category playlists or within the main Music Library?
Unless I'm mistaken older iTunes versions would sometimes put both videos and music in the main Library section now only used for music. But that may have been due to a 3rd party codec I was using for iTunes to import ogg vorbis files. iTunes sometimes made a mistake what was an audio or video file due to this codec I was using.

Have you checked the file-formats of the videos you added? They might not be an mpeg 4 or H262 format that iTunes understands. ITunes does not have any problem with the open source X264 but I'm not sure about some other patent formats. Even if they are MPeg 4 or H264, there might be some high profile settings about them that iTunes will not recognise. Though I'd have thought they would still be imported into iTunes library regardless of H264 profile, but playability would be the question.

BTW one trick for importing other kinds of videos into iTunes is to open the video using QuickTime 7 Player and do a 'Save As', and save as self-contained movie. Then drag and drop the .mov file into iTunes. However, to do this you will need to have either or both Perian, DivX or Flip4Mac installed on your system. This will allow you to watch AVI videos in iTunes. This has also worked for me with mkv and wmv files. But this will not allow such videos to be playable on iPod. Remember if QuickTime cannot play the video, then iTunes definitely will not be able to play it. iTunes uses QT for playback and conversions.

If you have an mp4 video file with chapters, these chapters will not be seen by either QT or iTunes or iPod unless you change the file extension to .mv4.


Some of Perian's abilities: DivX, 3ivx, Flash Video, Flash Screen Video, On2 VP3, VP6, VP8, H263I, Indeo 2, 3 & 5, MPEG-1, 2 & 4 Video (in supported formats), Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska/mkv), DTS Coherent Acoustics audio, AVI file format, Subtitles, AC3 audio.

My recommended video converters: Handbrake, then MPeg Streamclip (MPSC). Handbrake utilizes the best abilities of the most recent X264 versions. X264 has been the best H264 codec around for a few years but lacks any marketing. In comparison, MPSC contains editing abilities. But Handbrake in general seems to be able to maintain video quality (or equivalent bitrate) at smaller file sizes in comparison for files below about 1 GB. MPSC seems to do a better job for the larger finished file sizes.

My recommended audio ripper and converter: XLD (is recognised as the best Mac OSX audio CD ripper by Audiophile forums and private torrent sites for 'accurate' CD rips.) XLD uses Lame for mp3 conversion, will also read or convert to Flac, Monkey/APE (can also split APE album files into individual tracks), WavPack, Wave64, Ogg Vorbis, mp4, Apple Lossless.