Icons in Cover Flow

Question

Hi, I'm new to Leopard so please excuse me if this question has already been posted.
Cover Flow in Finder displays ICONS. I'd like to use Cover Flow to display my DVD COVERS.
In iTunes this isn't a problem. I simply add Artwork in Get Info. But I don't want to put all my DVDs into iTunes because I have to convert them to a lower resolution format to do it. I want to keep my DVD files in high resolution and use Cover Flow in Finder as a library for my movie collection.
Unfortunately Cover Flow in Finder does not have an add Artwork option because it just displays the Quicktime or other movie format Icons.
I think the only way around this is to convert my DVD covers to Icons. But they come out very poor quality.
Is there another way of doing this?
If not, is there a good Icon creator out there that will enable me to convert my high res. .jpg DVD covers into equally high res. Icons?
It's odd Cover Flow in Finder doesn't seem to work the same way as Cover Flow in iTunes. Surely they're both built on the same platform. In fact, Cover Flow in Finder isn't really COVER Flow at all, since I can't add Artwork (covers) to it! It should be called ICON flow.
Thanks.

Answer 1

MartinJapan2007 wrote:
With no Get Info/Add Artwork option in Finder's Cover Flow (unlike iTunes) I cannot change these base icons to the cover art, which is what I7d like to do.
As you note in your follow up post, you can add custom icons (up to 512 X 512 pixels) via Finder's Get Info but this is apparently not what you want. iTunes doesn't actually change the icons either; as mentioned earlier, it associates the music files with separate artwork files that Cover Flow (a display technology that both iTunes & Finder use) displays in place of the file's actual icon.
Cover Flow also supports displaying some embedded artwork -- images in the file itself. Media file types like mp4 are "containers" in that they hold a variety of data types, including video tracks, audio tracks, metadata information (like author, copyrights, or recording date), or even still images. Each file type has some scheme for identifying the various data types it supports.
Neither Cover Flow nor Finder (nor, for the most part, iTunes) supports embedding data in these file types. For that, you need an editor that can parse the container's data scheme & add or modify data in the proper format. A simple example is QuickTime Pro, with which you can set the "poster frame" to any frame of "mov" files. (This is actually metadata that just identifies the frame, not a separate image.) Cover Flow will look for this & if present will display the poster frame instead of the icon.
MPEG file types use different but somewhat similar schemes. (ITunes partially supports the mp3 MPEG scheme, thus the comment above about it.) To embed images or metadata in MPEG files you will need an editor with that capability. Currently, all that I know of are based on AtomicParsley, (so named because the MPEG scheme uses "atoms" to identify data types).
The AtomicParsley link explains this much better than I can; it is worth a read to get some idea of how this works & the relationship between iTunes & embedded MPEG data. At the end of the page you will find links to apps that use it to edit MPEG metadata. I know of no "all in one" editor for all MPEG file types; each is purposed for different uses. vID Infiltr8 metadata video tagger probably comes closest to what you want, since it can set artwork in MPEG 4 files.
For the other file types you mention, I do not know of a good editor. I believe VLC is capable of embedding some data types, but not in a user-friendly way -- you pretty much have to do everything manually.
If you use appropriate editors, you should be able to accomplish what you want, but I believe you will soon see that this is much more complex than it appears at first glance & may sometimes require rewriting the entire media file or have other consequences you were not expecting.