Alright, I searched this forum for a solution and have found none, so I'll make a new posts. I just finished re-encoding my complete collections of Star Trek TNG, Family Guy, and ATHF to H.264 and have imported them into iTunes. The problem is, I have found no way to tag them as "tv shows." I see how to choose between movie and music video, but AFAIK iTMS is the only place to get something that is a "TV show." What gives? Anybody know a workaround?
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iPod tagging video as a tv show?
- Thread starter danielsan26
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There really isn't a way to do it that I know of, which really does suck. However, I just made a playlist on the side, i.e. Family Guy season 1, and put those episodes in there. It now shows up as a Video Playlist which is better then sorting through the movies section. Hopefully Apple will allow the TV Show section in an update.
Maybe it's because I'm not using Quicktime 7.03 (ac3 reasons), but what is this TV thing you talk about. I downloaded the latest episode of Lost - I've got a tool that reads these atoms, so I'm curious (even if I can't watch the episode). What behavior is missing in your home-brew mpeg4 videos? The genre? The little tv icon?
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Josh396 said:
I have to agree with Josh on this, I find this method much easier than sorting through the "Videos" section
Hallelujah the first real info on this! Any clue what the "Show", "Season" and "Episode Number" tag atoms are?anaxamander said:
B
I know you can customize atoms in jhymn but I have only used it once to get rid of DRM back when I used to buy from the iTMS. Any tutorials on how to do this?
Atom "desc" contains: Kate's original crime that started her life on the run is revealed.
Atom "tvnn" contains: ABC{
Atom "tvsh" contains: Lost
Atom "tven" contains: 209
Atom "tvsn" contains:
Atom "tves" contains:
Atom "stik" contains: TV Show
-------------------
You can set these (and pretty much all other iTunes atoms) with my command line tool AtomicParsley:
http://atomicparsley.sourceforge.net/
Sorry, never used JHymn.
Atom "tvnn" contains: ABC{
Atom "tvsh" contains: Lost
Atom "tven" contains: 209
Atom "tvsn" contains:
Atom "tves" contains:
Atom "stik" contains: TV Show
-------------------
You can set these (and pretty much all other iTunes atoms) with my command line tool AtomicParsley:
http://atomicparsley.sourceforge.net/
Sorry, never used JHymn.
I've been playing with this aspect of the video iPod (organizing TV shows) very much recently and here's what I found:
As anaxamander said, the "stik" atom has to be a hex value of 0A to categorize it as "TV Show".
The tvsh atom is an ascii string containing the show name.
The tvsn atom should equal the hex value of the season. For example, I uploaded a season 31 episode of SNL, so the hex value for 31 would be 1F.
The tven is the ascii expression of the episode's production number (my SNL episode was 1428 [hex 31 34 32 38]).
The tves is the hex expression of the order in which the episode was shown in the season (if your episode was the fifteenth to be aired, then your value would be 0F).
The tvnn is the network which carries your show.
I've been editing my episodes using a hex editor, since iTunes does not yet support TV Show tagging. This method can be tedious, but I'd be glad to share more if anyone's interested.
As anaxamander said, the "stik" atom has to be a hex value of 0A to categorize it as "TV Show".
The tvsh atom is an ascii string containing the show name.
The tvsn atom should equal the hex value of the season. For example, I uploaded a season 31 episode of SNL, so the hex value for 31 would be 1F.
The tven is the ascii expression of the episode's production number (my SNL episode was 1428 [hex 31 34 32 38]).
The tves is the hex expression of the order in which the episode was shown in the season (if your episode was the fifteenth to be aired, then your value would be 0F).
The tvnn is the network which carries your show.
I've been editing my episodes using a hex editor, since iTunes does not yet support TV Show tagging. This method can be tedious, but I'd be glad to share more if anyone's interested.
I'm very interested. I'm not entirely efficient in hex yet but I could pick it up pretty quickly. Do I really need to know it?ignus graius said:
No, you don't (I figured this out by just playing around). I'm a Windoze user, but I don't see why this method wouldn't work on a Mac. All you need is a hex editor of your choice. You can search download.com if you don't already have one installed (I'm using Hackman).Josh396 said:
I'm sure anaxamander could explain this much better, but I found that there are two kinds of MPEG-4 tags, ones that require a string of text as a value, and ones that require a hex number. For example, if you edit the Artist information of a song, the atom that gets changed in your file is called "©ART" and it uses a string of text as a value.
(For strings of text, pay attention to the ascii data on the right pane.)
If you change the track number tag in iTunes, the "trkn" atom is changed, and it uses hex numbers as values. In this example, my song is track 3 of 15.
(For hex values, pay attention to the hex data on the left pane. Here you can see that "3 of 15" is represented as "03" and "0F" seperated by "00". The hex value of the number three is 03, and the hex value of the number fifteen is 0F.)
Now since iTunes won't let us change the TV Show tags, I input my data into the comment field and simply change the name of the tag using the hex editor.
I'm going to edit an episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. The first thing I will do is add a description tag. To do this, I type my description into the comment field in iTunes.
The comment tag in iTunes will show up as a "©cmt" atom:
Now all I do is change "©cmt" to "desc". My comment tag becomes a description tag.
I then use the same method to add a "tvsh" and "tven" atom. This will tag the TV show name and episode number.
The next tag I want to add is for the season number ("tvsn" atom). This uses a hex number for its data. To add this tag I will start off by tagging my video as being part of a compilation. This will add a "cpil" atom, and its data will be a hex value of "01".
To change this compilation tag to a TV Season tag, I change "cpil" to "tvsn". My episode is from season 13, so I change the "01" to "0D".
Remember, the value for the season tag is a hex value, so don't enter "13" as an ascii value. You must enter "0D" as a hex value.
If you want, you can use this same method to add a "tves" tag. From what I can tell, this tag is a hex value of the order the episode was shown in the season. My episode was the 19th shown, so for "tves" I use the hex value "13". To verify that the tag has been added, I checked my iTunes Music Library xml file, and saw this line:
<key>Episode Order</key><integer>19</integer>
Finally, to change the type of video from "Movie" to "TV Show", you must add the "stik" atom. This uses a hex value, so I again set my video as being part of a compilation. I change "cpil" to "stik" and I change "01" to "0A".
Unlike changing the other atoms, your change will not be readily apparent. I had to remove the video from my iTunes library and re-add it in order to change the video type to "TV Show." Once I did though, the third option became available.
Here's how it looks on my iPod:
To change this compilation tag to a TV Season tag, I change "cpil" to "tvsn". My episode is from season 13, so I change the "01" to "0D".
Remember, the value for the season tag is a hex value, so don't enter "13" as an ascii value. You must enter "0D" as a hex value.
If you want, you can use this same method to add a "tves" tag. From what I can tell, this tag is a hex value of the order the episode was shown in the season. My episode was the 19th shown, so for "tves" I use the hex value "13". To verify that the tag has been added, I checked my iTunes Music Library xml file, and saw this line:
<key>Episode Order</key><integer>19</integer>
Finally, to change the type of video from "Movie" to "TV Show", you must add the "stik" atom. This uses a hex value, so I again set my video as being part of a compilation. I change "cpil" to "stik" and I change "01" to "0A".
Unlike changing the other atoms, your change will not be readily apparent. I had to remove the video from my iTunes library and re-add it in order to change the video type to "TV Show." Once I did though, the third option became available.
Here's how it looks on my iPod:
I didn't realize there was already a thread about this:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/165185/
That method would probably be easier if you're on a Mac.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/165185/
That method would probably be easier if you're on a Mac.
No, I posted that topic after this one was already started. I wasn't getting the answers I needed in your topic so I created that one.
Yeah, hopefully the next iTunes version supports these extra tags, or at least QuickTime. These extra steps are ridiculous.darwen said:
Doubtful - if they had intended to allow end-users to change it, they would have enabled all the menu items, and saved the setting into the file. But they opted not to.ignus graius said:
And Quicktime does save metadata, but it saves it 1 level up, and saves the metadata directly onto the atom (iTunes has the "data" child atom that stores the metadata).
Seems as though Apple intends not to provide a means to add/set/change this data.
Yeah that looks painful. Especially since I have to do it to so many episodes. What really sucks is that you have to take it out of the library and then re add it. I'm guessing that once you do this for one episode it does put that option under all other videos to change it to a TV show does it?ignus graius said:
No, it doesn't.Josh396 said:
Another option is do all of that to one small video file, and then make a bunch of copies and add them all to iTunes. Once iTunes recognizes all those files as TV shows, delete the physical files so that an exclamation point shows up next to each video. When you choose Get Info, iTunes will ask if you want to locate the missing file. Just choose the real episode you want that entry to be linked to and the iTunes database will say it's a TV show, and even though it's not properly tagged it will still get transferred to the "TV Shows" section in your iPod.
And this might go without saying, but if there's a way to modify the iTunes database, you can modify your data there instead of modifying the actual file.
There is: this will leave the original file untouched, and... do something to the database:ignus graius said:
http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?threadid=132530
Edit: oops, nevermind. It edits the ipod database, not the iTunes database.
What's one of the television seasons someone is trying to put on their iPod? I want to experiment with something.
Question: I've editted exactly as you've specified, and everything works great (thanks for the detailed guide!), but I have one problem. When I sort the Video section by Episode Number (or Show, for that matter), the episodes appear in the order a computer would sort them.
For example, instead of episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 appearing like that, they appear 1, 10, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
Can anyone help with this problem? I realize putting zeros before the single digits will work, but is there a more elegant way? iTunes sorts by Track Number correctly...
For example, instead of episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 appearing like that, they appear 1, 10, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
Can anyone help with this problem? I realize putting zeros before the single digits will work, but is there a more elegant way? iTunes sorts by Track Number correctly...
Glad to see this working for people!astrobot10 said:
Did you put the "Episode Order" tag ("tves" atom) in your episodes? I think that has something to do with how the episodes are sorted.
Another thing...the episode numbers ("tven" atoms) are tagged as the official production numbers (at least the iTMS does it that way). E.g., the first pilot for Lost has an episode number of 100A, not just simply "1".
The TV Shows I've done all have official websites with episode guides to help you tag episode numbers and descriptions. The Simpsons' guide, for example, can be found here:
http://www.thesimpsons.com/episode_guide
This is not all that difficult to do. I can make the changes to the tag in about 30 seconds. That is well worth the problems it solves.