iTunes vexes me. For better or for worse, we’re an Apple household and own an Apple TV, so I’m kind of stuck with iTunes for managing my media files.
My wife and I have also purchased a significant amount of DVDs over the years, which I ripped to iTunes using the trusty old Handbrake (love you, Handbrake!). These DVDs include a lot of TV shows, such as Doctor Who and Magnum PI.
My workflow has always been: rip via Handbrake, then import into iTunes by dragging the m4v files onto the iTunes window. By default, the TV shows don’t have any metadata (no proper titles, descriptions, episode numbers, or artwork), and iTunes automatically files them under Movies. This means they’ll show up in Apple TV with no description, no preview picture (such as DVD box art), and no sequence information.
I recently heard someone mention iDentify, a Mac app that adds metadata to movie files. It’s not free, so I had reservations about buying it. However, $10 is a small price to pay for cleaning up such a big mess, especially if you’re a bit OCD like me. I decided to give it a try, and it works very well, especially for TV shows — if you manually specify each file’s season and episode number, iDentify will take care of the rest by performing lookups at thetvdb.com. Sweet.
iDentify took care of the metadata and artwork problem, but the files were still cluttering my Movies menu, making it very hard to navigate with a remote control. For example, Magnum PI went eight seasons and has over 150 episodes, so we’d have to navigate past 150 Magnum PI titles to get to any videos whose name began with N-Z. Very annoying.
For a long time my workaround was to create custom genres and shove the TV shows there, then stick to genres when navigating Apple TV. This always felt kludgy, and I wondered why I couldn’t just drag the TV show episodes onto the TV Shows section in iTunes. This weekend I decided to look into it, and stumbled onto a MacWorld article containing a solution so simple I had to do a double face-palm: change the Media Kind from Movie to TV Show.
Once set, the video is automagically moved from the iTunes Media/Movies folder to the iTunes Media/TV Shows folder, and shows up in the TV Shows menu!
Be sure to input the show’s name in the Video section so the episodes will be properly grouped.
The MacWorld article pointed out that this technique can be extended to group ANY videos. This piqued my interest — my wife and I own a lot of DVDs that contain high-quality special features, including the entire James Bond collection, Star Wars collection, and classic films like Lawrence of Arabia. As I mentioned, I’m partially OCD, so I’ve ripped quite a few of these special features. Until now, they’ve all cluttered up my Movies menu just like the TV shows did.
TV Show grouping to the rescue! By changing the videos’ Media Kind to TV Show, they get moved to the TV Show section and can then be grouped. For example, I grouped all of my James Bond special features under the heading “James Bond Featurettes”. Now when I navigate the TV Shows section of iTunes or Apple TV, I only see ONE listing for James Bond Featurettes and no longer need to sift through 100+ titles.
iTunes still leaves a lot to be desired, but I’m a happy camper now that my files are well-organized and have proper metadata.
For movies, why not just create a genre called “James Bond”. Keeps the movies under the movies tab and you don’t need to remember that some movies are under TV.
You can also sort them in production order by using the Sort Name under the Sorting tab. Just put 001 – in front of Dr. No and so on. This will display them in the JB genre by the order they came out. You can also just put the year they came out in front of the name. It doesn’t matter. You can just use 1,2,3 etc without the movie name. It only affects the order they display in and not any displayed information.
thanks for the suggestion. in fact, that’s exactly what i used to do, for the last several years. it always felt kludgy and doesn’t display well in apple tv. i’m still enjoying the new setup.