iTunes Movies & Genres on iPad

[danny_w]

Well I recently got my wife an iPad and am having difficulty figuring out the best way to get home videos onto the iPad so that she can find what she needs. On iTunes I have everything neatly arranged into Genres, but it seems as though the iPhone/iPad video app does not support this (although the music app does). This seems to me like a major step back. I have resorted to naming her videos with the genre name in the title so that they are at least alphabetized (but still a huge long list).

How do other people manage when they want more than a few videos on the iPad? These are videos of dance classes that she attends (usually only 1 or 2 minutes long each) and she might take several per night, so they add up fast. Having the videos on the iPad is great for showing the private lesson teacher what she needs to work on, but the list is getting too long.

 

[Night Spring]

Change media kind to podcast or tv show (Get Info > Options). Give all videos you want to put into a "folder" the same album name.

 

[danny_w]

Change media type to podcast or tv show.

That's an idea! Then you use the music app to play the videos?

 

[Night Spring]

That's an idea! Then you use the music app to play the videos?

No, they get sorted within the video app. See edit of my previous post.

 

[danny_w]

No, they get sorted within the video app. See edit of my previous post.

Are you talking about Home Sharing? I am talking about syncing where there does not seem to be any type of sorting. that I can see.

 

[Night Spring]

Are you talking about Home Sharing? I am talking about syncing where there does not seem to be any type of sorting. that I can see.

Yes, syncing. Video podcasts and TV shows get sorted into "folders" in the Video app. Try it and see.

 

[danny_w]

Yes, syncing. Video podcasts and TV shows get sorted into "folders" in the Video app. Try it and see.

I just did and didn't see anything. I will try it again. Maybe there are just too many movies on the iPad to see the folder. How do the folders get sorted along with the movies?

 

[Night Spring]

I just did and didn't see anything. I will try it again. Maybe there are just too many movies on the iPad to see the folder. How do the folders get sorted along with the movies?

When you sync podcasts or tv shows, you get tabs along the top of the video apps saying "Movies," "TV shows," "Podcasts." Within the TV Show and Podcast tabs, each show / podcast is in its own "folder," with a representative picture.

Like this: http://iphone.dashhacks.com/sites/iphone.dashhacks.com/files/images/Apple_iPad_Video_large.jpg

 

[danny_w]

When you sync podcasts or tv shows, you get tabs along the top of the video apps saying "Movies," "TV shows," "Podcasts." Within the TV Show and Podcast tabs, each show / podcast is in its own "folder," with a representative picture.

Like this: http://iphone.dashhacks.com/sites/iphone.dashhacks.com/files/images/Apple_iPad_Video_large.jpg

I didn't have any luck with this last night but I will try again later. This does sound like a good (albeit somewhat strange) workaround. Thanks for the help.

 

[danny_w]

Thanks to the help here and much experimentation I think that I finally found a workable way of doing things. Thanks for the help!

 

[danny_w]

Well I *thought* that I had found a good method. All of my videos are now classified as TV Show and show fine in iTunes and also on my iPhone. However on the iPad even though I get a folder for each show they are unlabeled! The labels show in iTunes and on the iPhone, so why not on the iPad? Is there a certain field that I must fill in to get it to show (I have been using the "Show" field).

EDIT: And the folders do not seem to be sorted in any order either.

 

[Night Spring]

Well I *thought* that I had found a good method. All of my videos are now classified as TV Show and show fine in iTunes and also on my iPhone. However on the iPad even though I get a folder for each show they are unlabeled! The labels show in iTunes and on the iPhone, so why not on the iPad? Is there a certain field that I must fill in to get it to show (I have been using the "Show" field).

EDIT: And the folders do not seem to be sorted in any order either.

Oh, right. I'm remembering now, it's been a while since I did this with my own videos. I ended up making them podcasts instead of tv shows because of this problem. If you make them podcasts, then the name you give each podcast gets displayed, but with tv shows, no names. *sigh* I don't remember if the podcasts get sorted in order or not, but at least, you'll be able to tell them apart.

 

[danny_w]

Oh, right. I'm remembering now, it's been a while since I did this with my own videos. I ended up making them podcasts instead of tv shows because of this problem. If you make them podcasts, then the name you give each podcast gets displayed, but with tv shows, no names. *sigh* I don't remember if the podcasts get sorted in order or not, but at least, you'll be able to tell them apart.

Thanks, I have it working now after many fruitless attempts and retries. At least I learned a lot during the process. For example, you cannot select multiple videos and change the media type to "Podcast"; something in iTunes screws things up and you may lose all access to the files from iTunes itself. Selecting each video individually works, but for some reason changing multiple files did not work; it somehow screws things up so that the next time you try to change media kind, Movie and TV Show are not even options anymore. There is probably some 3rd party tool that does it properly but it was quicker to do them one at a time than to look for a solution and do more experimentation.

I also found (luckily before I lost anything) that podcasts by default delete themselves automatically when played, so I made sure that I selected all podcasts and turned this feature off.

When my wife started playing the new videos as podcasts she also found that when one ends it leads directly into the next, which is kinda neat actually. I did not know that would happen.

Anyway, although the iPad is very polished in many respects this just shows that Apple needs to do a LOT of work on their video app. I don't see how they could miss such glaring problems as these. If I were looking for a tablet to use for watching movies, based on my experiences lately the iPad would be my very last choice. I am going to send feedback to Apple about this.

Thanks so much for your help. Thanks to you my wife's videos are finally organized and she can make good use of her iPad. Now I just need for remember the convoluted methods that I used when installing new videos (several per night usually). Apple could make things so much simpler if they would flesh out their video app to look like iTunes. Oh well, wishful thinking.

 

[Night Spring]

Glad to hear you've figured this out for now. My guess is Apple probably thought of "Movies"as being two-hour long, 2GB files, and figured users were only going to have a few of them at a time on their iPads, and forgot that users might have collections of shorter videos that need more organization. Perhaps we could leave them some feedback (http://www.apple.com/feedback/) if you haven't done it already? iBooks originally had no folders, but eventually acquired folders (which they call collections, but oh well). Let's hope they do that for movies, as well.