Ios 5 + Home Sharing + IPAD

No solution but seconding this problem with the iPad being a first generation one and the home computer being a Windows 7 desktop. Everything displays fine in iTunes, but viewing the shared video library on the iPad only shows about one third of the content with most items repeated at least once. I have turned home sharing off and back on on the main PC and on the iPad; no effect. ALL the items in question were visible before I upgraded iTunes to the latest version and the iPad to iOS5.

Edited to add: movies appear fine; I haven't checked music because my library is large. It is ONLY TV shows that are displaying this problem.

Same problem here too! Which is a shame because I only just noticed the feature and I'd love to use it 😟.

Another forum suggested that it was to do with the meta-data associated with the shows (i.e. missing Artist details), but I have just been through and set this on all 600+ shows and it didn't actually improve things...

Works fine on my Apple TV.

Dave,

PS iOS5 on first-gen iPad, Lion 10.7.2, iTunes 10.5 (141).

I have the same issue, anyone find an answer for this yet?

I have artwork for my movies in addition to my TV shows, and my movies are working fine.

If I have to guess, the problem may be related to how it is handling non-iTunes-Store additions in the TV show category. The vast majority of my collection are DVD rips with virtually all of the meta-data set properly - I'd put a lot of work into having them show up in order in the Video app with descriptions, etc.

It also works fine with the iPhone video app. Hope this gets fixed soon...

Hi all,

I have a solution (well kind of)...

I have managed to get all of mine working correctly, except that the very last season of my final TV show (alphabetically) doesn't appear in the list... Still it is a massive improvement!

Here's what I did:

1. I went through and set the Artist and Album Artist on all of them, just to something generic - this didn't seem to make an awful lot of difference, but I did for a fleeting moment manage to get a slightly different layout of wrong shows 😕
2. Then I looked at the difference between a purchased show and a ripped show - the only thing remaining (except for parental rating) was the Episode ID on the Video tab - I went through and set this on all of my 687 TV shows, which took a while 😢
3. What I noticed is that if I had the iPad next to me on the Home Sharing TV Shows page then every so often it refreshed and as I went down the list assigning unquie IDs to each episode it got better. The Episode ID appears to only have to be unique inside a particular show, so for Doctor Who's five series I started at 001 and counted up 🙂
4. This got me most of the way there, but in the case of Doctor Who series five (an iTunes download) it was still going wrong because they had labeled the Episode IDs 1 to 13. Once I had corrected this and made sure that all of the other episodes were labeled I got to my current situation - all but one TV show working (and all the series episodes are now in order). 😁

So I suggest that you try the same thing, try assigning show unique Episode IDs and cross your fingers!

Good luck! 😉

Dave,

Hi guys, first post so be gentle :-)

I've been tearing my hair out with this too.

Just to add to the above posts:-

What I've done that appears to be working is

1) Select an entire series in iTunes

2) Get info

3) On the INFO Tab, set the 'Album' field to show the series and series number.

4) On the VIDEO Tab, set the 'Episode ID' to match the 'Episode' field.

Until I did this most of my TV series were not showing on iPad2 at all. They now show each series in the correct order (I think the 'Album Field' does this). Setting the 'Episode ID' field as above makes sure each episode is in the correct order

It's hard to explain without pictures but I've written below an example I've done for the first episode of the first series of Father Ted.

INFO TAB

Name

Good Luck Father Ted

Artist

Father Ted

Album Artist

Father Ted

Album

Father Ted - Series 1

VIDEO TAB

Programme

Father Ted

Episode ID

1

Series No.

1

Episode

1

Hope this helps someone.

p.s. one thing I can't figure yet, on programmes that have more than 9 series, Series 10 shows first in list on iPad, then Series 1, Series 2 etc

Re my post above and the, p.s. about series 10 shows,

If you remove all entries from the SORTING TAB it shows all series in the correct order, i.e. 10 comes after 9.

Thanks to everyone who put in time researching this issue - it must have been pretty tedious.

I've gotten files to aggregate and display correctly (on an iPad) by filling out the Artist and EpisodeID fields as described above (unique episode ID for each episode). However, despite lots of experimentation, I've had no luck at getting the iPad Video app to display the titles of shows in the top-level view.

For example, here's a collection with two different seasons of The Amazing Race. The Video app shows the "Season X" label, but not the name of the show. (As a result, I added cover images to identify the shows as a work-around.)

Even the display of "Season X" seems to be inconsistent. I could have sworn that when I added those shows to the library the first time, with cover images, the "Season X" labels did not appear. Then when I removed the cover images, the labels apppeared, and when I restored the images, they stayed... Odd.

What I'd really like is for the app to display text labels for the show name AND the season, regardless of whether there are cover images or not. Come to think of it, this is what I'd like for movies as well: the name should be displayed as a label whether or not the movie has a cover image. (In the case of movies, the presence of a cover image seems to suppress title display.)

Has anyone been able to achieve anything like this? I've tried all kinds of different tag combinations, but it appears "Season X" is the only label the app is capable of displaying.

I think I found out why TV shows/seasons are disappearing at the end of the list in the iPad Video app!

In my case, I lost a TV show at the end of my list on the iPad Video app. My Artist fields were filled in correctly, the season numbers were correct, and the Episode ID fields were all unique. However, the Sort Album fields for my TV shows were incorrect. For every season of every show, the Sort Album field must be unique. The Sort Album field must also be identical for all episodes within that season.

I figured this out when I noticed the following symptom: If, when using Home Sharing, you are unable to find a TV show/season in the VIDEO app on your iPad, check to see IF ANY OTHER TV SERIES/SEASON IS LISTED MORE THAN ONCE! I bet you will find at least one duplicate, and that may be the source of your problem!

You see, each season of each TV series should be listed in the Video app only once. But if the Sort Album field isn't set properly, a single TV series/season may show up multiple times in your list. When this happens, the duplicate entries of that TV show will push other TV shows off the end your list. And that's why the TV shows at the end of the list disappear!

For example, I own several episodes of the fifth season of MythBusters, but I had 2 entries for Season 5 in my iPad Video app. I checked the episodes, and they all had "MythBusters" listed as the artist, with the proper season and episode numbers. However, some episodes had their Sort Album field set to, "MythBusters, Season 5" while others had the Sort Album field set to just, "MythBusters".

By setting all the episodes in that season to the same unique name: "MythBusters, Season 5", the duplicate Season 5 in my iPad Video app went away, and the TV series at the end of my list magically reappeared!

If you suffer the symptom listed above, make sure that every season of every show has a unique Sort Album field, and that the field is the same for all episodes within each season.

Good Luck!

Jonathan

Having exactly the same problem here. Troubleshooted but nothing is resolving it.

iMac is fine, iPad sees multiple copies of one or two TV series instead of what should be there. Driving me slightly nuts to be honest.

I'm guessing that multiple factors (Album, Episode IDs, sort fields, and probably others) are causing this bug. Only when the Video app is happy with several fields at once do you not loose shows.

The catch that is getting most people is that the missing TV seasons might not be at fault here! If you see multiple copies of the same TV series/season, then I suspect that your problem lies there.

Try tweaking/matching the fields of the duplicate TV series/season to see if you can get rid of the duplicates. They shouldn't be there and are the cause of the missing TV show problem.

I think there's more at issue here than a simple sorting problem. I too see the duplicate items and random groupings described in this thread, but I'm also unable to see some TV shows. For example, I have several seasons of Futurama. Some show up on my iPad via Homeshare, although randomly and repeatedly grouped. But Futurama Season 5 doesn't show up at all via Homeshare on my iPad.

I'm hesitant to scrub all the sorting values (e.g. Album, Episode ID, etc.) as described here since I'm also seeing missing seasons via Homeshare. I'm hoping this is an iTunes bug that, when fixed, resolves the duplicate/random-groupings as well as missing titles via Homeshare.

However, if anyone has found a workaround solution that solves both the duplicate/random-groupings problem as well as missing titles, please let us know. 😕