Some TV shows not showing in Sharing on iPad

same deal for me.

Handbrake my TV Shows...manually add them to iTunes.

After iOS 5, my devices stopped working correctly - showed a bunch of dulpicates and some not even showing up anymore. iOS 4.3.5 devices still worked fine.

I went into iTunes, TV Shows and manually edited the "sort" data of each season or show.

Once I entered data there - everything started to work fine.

Less than 15 minutes to fix whatever iOS 5 wasn't liking.

@noelani72

Might you be able to elaborate a little more on "manually edited the "sort" data of each season or show"

What did you do or didn't do?

Thanks in advance!!😉

I'm still trying to sort this whole thing out...

Hi, Nathan.

I can tell you what I did and what worked for me.

There were a few things I did first. I'll list them out here:

1. On the Info tab, I followed a suggestion from another thread and named the Artist and Album Artist exactly the same and then in the Video tab, made the Show the same name as well.

2. In the Video tab, I entered in the season number and episode number, but I created my own unique Episode ID for every show because I have had previous issues with official IDs being and odd combinations of characters and often not being in sequential order. This in turn would make my shows out of order within the seasons. So what I did, for example, for The Office, season 2 episode 1, created the ID "OFFICE201", then "OFFICE202" for the second episode and so on. It's really up to you how you name the IDs, but a unique, sequential method proves to be best.

3. The last thing that I think really fixed everything was naming the Album and then using that same information in the Sorting tab. For example, on the Info page in the Album field, I put "The Office, Season 2". In the Sorting tab

I put "Office, Season 2" so it sorts by the word "Office" and not "The".

I never really thought it made a difference, but part 3 really seemed to be the most important. Before I renamed the shows, I had the titles set like "The Office - Season 2". I instead went back and deleted the dash and used a comma like this "The Office, Season 2". Once I made these changes in iTunes on my media server Mac mini, I would actually watch on my iPad as the shows started reordering themselves and appearing again right before my eyes.

Let me know if you have any questions. I am completely "back up and running" with every TV show showing up in order in the Video App on my iPad.

Hope it helps!

-Frank

Sure Nathan.

First off, I am using a PC, Windows Vista, iTunes 10.5.1.

I use Handbrake and its AppleTV template to transfer my media to my iTunes library in .m4v format.

I was already sorting my collection very well.

If it was a season of Dexter; I went into the properties of each file as I added it to my libray and told it to be a TV Show instead of a Movie...told it to be part of a collection so I only had one thumbnail - which when double-clicked, revealed the list of episodes for that season.

To do this - I did this;

1) Create the media and copy it into my iTunes library. All my movies/tv shows copy to the "Movies" section of my iTunes. Not sure why...prolly the default. In doing so, it merely dumps the 20 episodes right there...all a mess.

2) Select all episodes. Right click. Chose "get info". I accept any message that tells me to modify all selected files and it gives me a Multiple Item Information window with tabs to choose from such as Info, Video, Sorting, and Options.

3) Select the Video tab. Under "Show", I enter data. For example, if it's 20 episodes of Dexter Season 1, I enter "Dexter" in the "Show" field. I then checkmark the box next to "Season Number" and I enter "1" since it is Season 1.

4) Next, I select the Options tab. This is where iTunes knows to move my media files from the Movies section of my library to the TV Shows section. On the Options tab, there is an option for "Media Kind". It has a drop down menu...click it. In my case, I want to move the Dexter files from my "movies" section to the "TV Shows" section.

That's all I used to do and it worked FINE all the way to iOS 4.3.5.

Now then. iOS 5.x it stopped working. I had many duplicates showing up on my iPad and not everything was seen...which prompted me to search these forums.

From suggestions in this thread, I added more information to my media files.

My fix was to add a fifth step.

5) Re-read my previous 1-4 steps and take off from there....there is a "Sorting" tab - click it. All fields are blank. I entered data into the last field, the "Sort Show" field. In my case, I called it Dexter Season 1 and clicked OK.

As soon as I entered that tiny bit of info, my library began to repair itself.

I went into each season....made that addition and simultaneously on my iPad the TV Shows began to re-oragnize and straighten out. There was a glitch with some of my coverart not showing up as a result...I don't remember if turning off Home Sharing on my iPad fixed it or if I re-copied the custom artwork file from my Pictures folder and re-applied it to the "Artwork" section under the "Info" tab.

I truly feel your frustration. I'm glad I saw this thread, was able to understand the workaround and get my library back in order rather easily....but it shouldn't have broken to begin with. iOS upgrades should not break something that had worked fine. In Apple's defense - the glitch made me learn to be more specific in my homebrew media insertion to the library.

Sigh. None of these suggestions worked for me. I still am unable to see TV shows and music. I guess I'll just have to wait for Apple to fix the problem. In the meantime, I'll have to copy music and video from my laptop to my iPad. What a pain.

Sorry to hear that you're still struggling with this. Here's a long shot: have you checked that your Parental Controls in iTunes are set correctly, and that Restrictions on your iPad are disabled or set correctly? I was playing around with this on my system and found that you can block the sharing of content with iPads/iPhones/etc. using the "Restrict explicit content" option.

I would just like to say that wih the help of ALL you guys & gals that have been having this issue......

I'm back.....😁

Game on...🙂

Thank you thank you thank you!

Something I noticed after going back and making some changes again, the Video app is now starting a TV or movie from the point I left it playing from my Apple TV or Mac mini.

Before I made my most recent changes, that never worked. It would always start from the beginning of the show.

-Frank

Hey all,

i notice that you all are talking about renaming and resorting tv shows in order to make this problem workout. i have a bunch of tv shows and used videomonkey to add the metadata to them, so all the information is correct, but i am still having these issues also. home sharing is only loading three tv shows i have, but in itunes i have about 15. it loads the same three tv shows over and over again.

Hello, topspin411.

I've never used Video Monkey, but if it adds the metadata for you and includes the official episode IDs, that could be the issue. A lot of the original IDs are not necessarily in an alphebetical or numerical order. Some don't even seem to match the show and seem like a random set of numbers and letters.

I went through and renamed all of my IDs with a name of my own choice, for example; Family Guy season 2, episode 1 would be: FAMGUY201, and so on. I also changed artist and show data.

Even new episodes that have downloaded automatically from iTunes are showing up out of order, all because of the episode ID. So I change them manually.

Not sure if you saw my earlier post, but my method of organizing my TV shows worked perfectly. I got some help from other links and posts and combined that with my own ideas. Relying on iTunes or the studio's metadata caused things to either be out of order or not even show up.

Hope that helps. I can elaborate if you need more help.

-Frank

Frank

I will give it a try. I started last night but I have so many seasons that it will take some time. I notice actually the I added three seasons of one show, and had changed the episode id's so they were in order, and when I went to the iPad to shared library, one of the season showed up twice even though in iTunes it only showed up once. I keep all my shows on an external drive so I'm hoping by adding one by one (not copying, just making so iTunes searches the external drive) I can figure out more to tell ya :). Thanks for the help! Jason

Frank,

Your comment was right on. Worked great.

Thanks bro!

Jesse

I found a quick solution for this, just go into the info file as people previously spoke about (be sure you are selecting all files for the TV show) and go to the video tab, check the box marked show and then enter the name of the show. Hit ok and that should enable you to add the show in the IPAD section of itunes. Hope it works.

Just wanted to add to this thread that I'm experiencing the same issue and feel strongly that it's a bug that the iOS Video app team should correct. I put a lot of time into ripping and tagging my DVDs so that they would work with iTunes and my Apple TV 2. This meant filling in these fields:

- Info->Name (episode title)

- Video->Show (show name)

- Video->Season (season #)

- Video->Episode Number (episode #)

When I got an iPad and attached it to the same library (which works in iTunes and on the ATV2), several things were broken. Show titles do not appear in the browser. Shows appear multiple times. Shows are in an apparently arbitrary order. Once you click on a season, episodes are ordered by title rather than by the episode number.

Apple, please fix these blatant bugs. Having an iPad app ignore most of the iTunes metadata fileds that iTunes and the ATV2 use is a long way off from "it just works". Adding more metadata to my library to account for extreme inconsistencies in Apple app implementations is an enormous hassle. I'll try to make the best out of the situation by learning some AppleScript to ease my pain.

Thanks to Frank and noelani72 for the suggestions that are helping me clean up this mess.

edit: I am running the current versions of iTunes and iOS, as of 2/8/2012

Message was edited by: mirth23

This AppleScript copies from one tag to another, which is great for copying episode number into episode id: http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=thistagthattag