TV shows don't appear on Apple TV

[Boyd01]

Just got an Apple TV, sorry if there is something obvious I'm missing. I have a large iTunes Library of movies and TV shows that are ripped from DVDs I own using Handbrake.

Using home sharing on the Apple TV, all my movies work fine. The first time I tried the Apple TV, there was a menu item (under computers) for TV shows but it only listed one of several series that I have in iTunes. Then a minute later that show disappeared and I got a message to the effect "you have not purchased any TV shows". Now, there isn't even a TV show heading under computers.

Is it not possible to watch this home-ripped content on an Apple TV? The TV shows have been ripped the same was as the movies with Handbrake and they appear correctly on my Mac in iTunes with season, episode number, etc. They are all categorized as "TV Shows" in iTunes (Get Info > Options > Media Kind > TV Show) and I have "Share entire library" selected under Preferences > Sharing.

Hopefully there is a work-around for this since I have about 200 TV shows in my Library.

 

[Otago Lad]

So long as you have Home Sharing on in both the aTV and your iTunes library then select "Computer" from the aTV's main screen and you should see the name of your iTunes library.

Select your iTunes Library and you'll see Music, Movies, TV Shows etc - choose whichever one and you'll see your "local" iTunes content.

The "Movies" and "TV Shows" icons on the aTV home screen take you to the iTunes store and not your local iTunes stuff - this has been a complaint for ages.

If you have a movie/tv show downloaded from the iTunes store then if you go into the Movies/TV Shows icon on the aTV home screen you'll see these in the "Purchased" section, however if you choose these you'll be streaming from Apple's servers and not from the your local PC/Mac iTunes.

Hope this helps.

 

[Boyd01]

Update: looks like the problem was that I had not entered any "Genre" for most of my TV shows. The ones that did have a genre were the ones that appeared on the list earlier. I added it to a few shows in several other series and they are now listed on Apple TV.

But that leads to another question.... it seems that I cannot enter a genre for multiple TV shows when I select them together in iTunes. If I do Get Info > Info > Genre with multiple items selected from the TV Show list, I can enter a genre. But when I click OK, it does not actually enter (or change the existing) genre.

With movies, I can enter or change the genre of multiple items with no problem, so it's just an oddity of the TV shows category.

Is this an iTunes bug? Is there some other way to edit the info in multiple TV shows. Will be a pain doing it one at a time for 200 episodes.

----------

So long as you have Home Sharing on in both the aTV and your iTunes library then select "Computer" from the aTV's main screen and you should see the name of your iTunes library.

Thanks Otago, but I do understand all the basics already, and it looks like I've found the problem (although it seems odd that the lack of a Genre prevents the shows from being listed).

 

[Otago Lad]

Apologies - missed the part in your first email where you said you went in through "Computers".

I have something like 12,000 tv episodes in my local iTunes library and a number have no genre so not sure what the particular issue for you is.

I do recall quite some time ago that there was an issue where you can have certain file types that show up in iTunes on your Mac/PC but which the aTV won't show and won't play - I'm sure its not that but worth eliminating at least.

 

[Boyd01]

Thanks. I don't know what might be different on your system, but adding the genre fixed everything for me. That was definitely the problem - as I added a genre to each item it would then appear on the Apple TV. Maybe adding some other form of metadata would also have done this, I don't know. My shows all had the year, series, season and episode numbers.

Never could find a way to edit multiple tv shows in iTunes, but using keyboard shortcuts in the Get Info (cmd-V, cmd-N) was actually pretty quick - took less than 10 minutes to add the genre to all 200 shows.

And now all my TV shows appear on my Apple TV.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Never could find a way to edit multiple tv shows in iTunes, but using keyboard shortcuts in the Get Info (cmd-V, cmd-N) was actually pretty quick - took less than 10 minutes to add the genre to all 200 shows.

And now all my TV shows appear on my Apple TV.

Using a tagging program like IDentify really simplifies things after you rip the discs - takes care of all metadata & adds to iTunes for you.

 

[Boyd01]

Thanks, I should probably look into that.

I also experienced a problem of the artwork disappearing from a bunch of my movies. Googling, it seems like this is a problem going way back with iTunes. Not sure exactly what caused this, but everything was fine until I started using iTunes with the Apple TV.

The artwork is still there in Get Info, and if you simply look at it there, it is restored in the view. I was able to fix this by going to Get Info > Artwork and then just pressing cmd-N repeatedly to step through all my movies.

Everything is fine now, so hopefully this was somehow related to a crash or network problem. Have made a lot of changes recently, moving my library to a network drive, installing an ethernet interface, upgrading system software, etc.

 

[W1LLk]

I was just going to chime in and say that the key piece of meta data here is "media type". iTunes recognizes "movie", "TV show", and "home video".

Handbrake by default will leave this blank, and occasionally mark movies correctly but not other videos such as TV shows. That's why if you don't clean up the meta data you can end up with a lot of your content being dumped into "home video".

 

[Boyd01]

Thanks, but that is something I learned long ago. �� That wasn't the problem, the media type was correctly set.

I now believe the problem was related to some kind of network problem (or bug?) that corrupted my iTunes library. I experienced a few crashes while setting up some new hardware.

Following my last post, I noticed little "i" icons next to a bunch of my movies, indicating a problem. Clicking on one of those movies, iTunes said it couldn't find the files and asked me to locate them. They were where they belonged and I was able to link all but 6 of them back up. The remaining 6 were just gone. But I was able to easily restore them from a backup.

So something was definitely wrong with my library. But now it seems to be OK again. And since everything is finally setup the way I want, hopefully it will be stable now. The two backup drives that I ordered arrived today and I am going to use CCC to do rotating backups on them, so I should be covered.