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iTunes TV Show Seasons Groupings

X

X5-599

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 28, 2012
110
15
Sorry if this was asked before. My searching skills really haven't been good, lately.

I converted some episodes of two seasons of a TV Show and imported them into iTunes. It groups them together. But just by season. Not by Show. That means I have to "Folders" TVShowXY-Season1 and TVShowXY-Season2.

What I don't like about that is that it shows the same in AppleTV. If I import all my DVDs this way, the list would be really long and complicated to navigate. Is there no way to have it grouped by show name? I've been googleing for quite a while now. Nothing seems to work.
 
SandboxGeneral

SandboxGeneral

Moderator emeritus
Sep 8, 2010
26,482
10,051
Detroit
X5-599 said:
Sorry if this was asked before. My searching skills really haven't been good, lately.

I converted some episodes of two seasons of a TV Show and imported them into iTunes. It groups them together. But just by season. Not by Show. That means I have to "Folders" TVShowXY-Season1 and TVShowXY-Season2.

What I don't like about that is that it shows the same in AppleTV. If I import all my DVDs this way, the list would be really long and complicated to navigate. Is there no way to have it grouped by show name? I've been googleing for quite a while now. Nothing seems to work.
Click to expand...

The best way I found to organize my library is to do it the same way Apple does it in iTunes. For each episode, click the Get Info button and fill them out the same as Apple.

Below are examples I took of each tab in Get Info for the show Big Bang Theory and by following this style, I got all my shows organized properly that I've manually added.
 

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A

aussie guy

macrumors newbie
Dec 15, 2010
2
0
If I understand your post correctly, you don't want to see (for example) "Big Bang Theory, Season 1", "Big Bang Theory, Season 2", etc etc when you view your TV episodes on AppleTV, is that right? You just want to see "Big Bang Theory"? It's an annoyance I face too, given I have so many TV shows with multiple seasons in each. It's frustrating that iTunes/AppleTV interface doesn't implement the same folder structure that is given to the actual files on my Mac, where each season of a TV show is grouped together inside of a folder that is just the show name.

There isn't really any good solution, however you can, if you like, have all the episodes of a show grouped together, with the trade-off being that they will no longer be in separate seasons. To do this you would remove the season number from all of the episodes, and instead keep the chronology of episodes by changing the Disc Number to be the old season number. So to use the screengrabs in the post above to explain what I mean, you would remove the "6" from the "Season Number" field, and change the fields under "Disc Number" to be "6 of 6". If the episode was from Season 5, you would have changed the "Disc Number" field to read "5 of 6".

I'm not a fan of this approach since, when I have shows with 8 or 9 or more seasons and 22-24 episodes a season it becomes too hard to locate a particular episode, but as far as I know, that's the only solution that lets you retain episode numbers, while removing each season appearing as a separate item within the iTunes/AppleTV interface. Basically you trade off your initial list of shows being too long and complicated to navigate with your list of episodes being too long and complicated to navigate.

EDIT: I just rechecked this method using my converted episodes of Seinfeld, and frustratingly it wanted to sort all episode 1's, then 2's and so on. I'm sure I have seen it keep them in chronological order somehow, you might want to try editing both the episode number and/or the episode ID to reflect the following notation - Season-numberEpisode-number, so, for example, the 5th episode of season 1 would be 105, the 12th episode of season 8 would be 812, etc.
 
Last edited:
X

X5-599

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 28, 2012
110
15
SandboxGeneral said:
The best way I found to organize my library is to do it the same way Apple does it in iTunes. For each episode, click the Get Info button and fill them out the same as Apple.

Below are examples I took of each tab in Get Info for the show Big Bang Theory and by following this style, I got all my shows organized properly that I've manually added.
Click to expand...



aussie guy said:
If I understand your post correctly, you don't want to see (for example) "Big Bang Theory, Season 1", "Big Bang Theory, Season 2", etc etc when you view your TV episodes on AppleTV, is that right? You just want to see "Big Bang Theory"? It's an annoyance I face too, given I have so many TV shows with multiple seasons in each. It's frustrating that iTunes/AppleTV interface doesn't implement the same folder structure that is given to the actual files on my Mac, where each season of a TV show is grouped together inside of a folder that is just the show name.

There isn't really any good solution, however you can, if you like, have all the episodes of a show grouped together, with the trade-off being that they will no longer be in separate seasons. To do this you would remove the season number from all of the episodes, and instead keep the chronology of episodes by changing the Disc Number to be the old season number. So to use the screengrabs in the post above to explain what I mean, you would remove the "6" from the "Season Number" field, and change the fields under "Disc Number" to be "6 of 6". If the episode was from Season 5, you would have changed the "Disc Number" field to read "5 of 6".

I'm not a fan of this approach since, when I have shows with 8 or 9 or more seasons and 22-24 episodes a season it becomes too hard to locate a particular episode, but as far as I know, that's the only solution that lets you retain episode numbers, while removing each season appearing as a separate item within the iTunes/AppleTV interface. Basically you trade off your initial list of shows being too long and complicated to navigate with your list of episodes being too long and complicated to navigate.

EDIT: I just rechecked this method using my converted episodes of Seinfeld, and frustratingly it wanted to sort all episode 1's, then 2's and so on. I'm sure I have seen it keep them in chronological order somehow, you might want to try editing both the episode number and/or the episode ID to reflect the following notation - Season-numberEpisode-number, so, for example, the 5th episode of season 1 would be 105, the 12th episode of season 8 would be 812, etc.
Click to expand...

Thanks to the both of you. I'm trying to edit those fields. Maybe I end up with something that's acceptable. Like you said, it would be nice to have just one entry per Show. But I try to visualize my Friends DVD Box in this scenario. 10 season each 24 or so episodes. The horror.
Wha can't Apple just implement an interface structure like Plex? Show->Season->Episode.
 
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