TV Show sorting

I just did some digging, and it turns out TV Shows now appear on the iPhone/iPod touch in alphabetical order by FILE NAME.

For example, if the file name of Season 3 - Episode 7 is 3-Blind-Mice.m4v, and the file name of Season 1 - Episode 1 is Zorro-Returns.m4v, then they will appear on the iPhone as:

3 Blind Mice
...
Zorro Returns

So, I went back to the TV Shows folder in my iTunes Music folder and renamed my TV Show files so the alphabetical order is also the episode order, so from the example above, the new names would be:
03-07-3-Blind-Mice.m4v
01-01-Zorro-Returns.m4v

And they will appear on the iPhone/iPod touch as:

Zorro Returns
...
3 Blind Mice

Hope this helps!

AARGH!!

Changing the file names DID NOT FIX THE ORDER!

Sorry for the false hope!

After talking to Apple Support on the phone, they said to go to apple.com/feedback and request let Apple know how stupid the new order is and to put it back the way it was before OS 3.1!

No it doesn't but I believe this is a problem with the iPod/iPhone software, not of iTunes.

After A LOT of testing, I have figured out how it is sorting the tv shows, currently as of iPhone OS 3.1.2

All sorting is based on the EPISODE NUMBER field in the VIDEO page. This is a sequential numbering of the entire series. The EPISODE NUMBER field is not shown on the screen listing.

To make the list sort properly, you will want to use full Season and Episode numbering in the EPISODE NUMBER field. For example, season 3, episode 8 should be entered in the EPISODE NUMBER field as 308.

If there are multiple shows with the same EPISODE NUMBER (which there never should be), it will be grouped together based on this number then alphabetically sorted by the NAME field. (This is what TRON was trying above)

To make it show the season and episode text under the show name, add the season number in the SEASON field in the VIDEO page and the episode number in the TRACK field in the INFO page. Using the previous example, SEASON field will be 3 and the TRACK field will be 8. These are arbitrary numbers to be shown in the text and are NOT related to the sorting order at all.

If you do not enter anything into the SEASON and TRACK fields, it will show "unknown" under the NAME in the list.

FYI, the EPISODE ID field is not used nor shown. This is often a string of letters and numbers of the production company and isn't reliable.

Hope this helps. Bobbbo, if this resolves your problem, please mark this post as Solved and the thread as Answered. Thanks

Ok now that I have my shows sorted correctly how do I get them to just keep playing like on a playlist? I can't create a playlist but sometimes when I'm playing them they just go to the next show without me having to select what to play next which is what I want to be able to do. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

I just bought a 64GB iPod Touch, mainly to use as a personal video player. I've been pretty disappointed with the way TV shows are sorted. Basically, I see two big problems with the current firmware:

1) Episode sorting is based only on episode number. This is the worst solution. Really, it should be based on season, then episode number. As an alternative, I'm OK with it sorting things by episode ID, but I'd much rather it be sorted by Season, then episode number.

2) The video screen should split out seasons of TV shows. Right now, all episodes from a TV show end up in the same "folder". There should be an extra level of folders for Season number. So, you click on Series_Name from the main video screen, then you see menu entries for "Season 1", "Season 2", etc., then you get to a menu with episode names.

I have to assume Apple knows about this problem by now, but have you sent this to Apple using the form at http://www.apple.com/feedback/ ? I did earlier today. Hopefully somebody at Apple reads it and does something about it. This couldn't be that difficult to fix.

I think I know why this bug came to be. Firmware version 3.0 got rid of the television season subgrouping. So, after that update, instead of group TV shows first by show and then by season, all episodes from the same show get grouped together. The sorting method probably didn't change. It was fine to just sort by episode number when things were grouped by season. But, now that all seasons are grouped together, you get this nasty [S1E01], [S2E01], [S1E02], [S2E02], etc. sorting order.

Yeah I got that info about how to get the shows sorted correctly and I have done that so they are correct now. The only thing is I can't get them to just play one after the other but sometimes they will just start playing one after the other in the correct order and I want to figure out how to get it to do that every time. It's annoying to have to keep selecting to play the next episode.