Home sharing missing content and messes thing up

I have the same problem with TV shows missing on my iPad and iPhone. All my content displays on my Apple TV2. All my itunes TV media have a Season and Episode ID and Episode Number. ARGGGGH!!! Any one can help fix this problem or how do we report this problem to Apple.

This has been driving me nuts, too. My setup: Mac OS X Lion, iTunes 10.5.1, iOS 5.0.1 on an iPad 2.

I've spent hours trying to figure this out. Other threads here suggest other approaches, none of which worked for me.

I finally have the Videos app on my iPad displaying TV shows correctly. The TV shows are a mix of purchased from iTunes and self-ripped. Here are the metadata attributes that seem to be critical for this alchemical combination to work with my setup:

1. Name
2. Album -- in the format, "Show, Season X" (e.g. "Battlestar Galactica, Season 1").
3. Show
4. Artist (must be same as Show)
5. Album Artist (must be same as Show)
6. Track (must be sequentially numbered within a season, but can be duplicated across two seasons -- e.g. Season 1 Episode 1 can coexist peacefully with Season 2 Episode 1)
7. Season
8. Episode (sequentially numbered within a season, but can be duplicated across two seasons)
9. Episode ID (uniquely numbered across all seasons, e.g. "BSG101" to "BSG113" followed by "BSG201" for the next season)
10. Year

For the visually-inclined, here's a screenshot showing what works (and what's irrelevant, given the blank columns):

After much experimentation, I've found that ALL multi-season TV shows must have unique Album names. If 8 out of 10 have unique names, but two seasons of the same TV show have the same name, then this will have cascading and unpredictable effects on what's displayed in the Video app.

Video app versions prior to iOS 4 didn't care about #2, #4, $5, #6 -- all of which I had to set to get this to work after upgrading my iPad to iOS 5. YMMV.

Clearly, the IOS 5.0 and 5.0.1 versions of the Video app are buggy. I hope that this helps others until a later version fixes this.

Regards,

Steven

Very nicely summarized, Steven - thanks for taking the time to write this all down.

I was able to get video sharing to work in my (simple) situation using a subset of these rules. However, yours are considerably more detailed and universal. Next batch, I'll be following your system.

Thanks for spelling it out for us..

I will give this a shot on a few seasons/episodes and post if it solved my issues as well.

Thanks again!!

updated thread with my fix:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3461493?start=15&tstart=0

THANK YOU! THANK YOU!

You fixed it for me and probably all of us!!!

YEAH!!!!

Glad that it helped!

No, I have over 2000 episodes of tv shows.

I had to retag my iTunes bought stuff, it was tagged as music.

Worked for me. Thanks!

Now if only a programmer at Apple would go back and make the Video app less buggy and fragile, we'd be all set!

This also worked for me, in fact as I changed them on itunes I can see them updated in the ipad on there own!

The problem is after I fixed them all the next day the artwork is again mixed up with other TV shows. This time all the meta is correct!

If I delete a TV Show, then re add it it then appears correct again without changing ant mete-tags, but a few days later that show is again mixed up? This is only on the iPad with Home Sharing, AppleTV has never had an issue.

I suspect that something in your metadata still needs to be cleaned. But if you've checked everything twice, then it sounds like something, somewhere, is caching the interim (bad metadata) state.

I'd try the following complete sequence:

1. Turn off Home Sharing on your PC/Mac (iTunes > Menubar > Advanced > Turn off Home Sharing)
2. Shut down iTunes on your PC/Mac. Reboot your PC.
3. On your iPad, turn off Home Sharing (Settings > Video > Home Sharing > clear entries or enter gibberish)
4. Clear the Videos app suspended state (double-click Home to reveal multitasking bar, hold down Video app until everything goes into "wiggle mode" and then press the "X")
5. Do a cold reboot of your iPad (hold down the Home and Power buttons until the red Power Off slider appears, but DO NOT release the buttons until the screen blanks and the Apple startup icon reappears)
6. Reenable Home Sharing on your PC/Mac
7. Reenable Home Sharing on your iPad

This is time-consuming but ensures that you have a completely clean slate every time. I spent more time than I'd care to admit cycling through this until I realized that the key was cleaning my metadata.

Regards,

Steven

StoneSoup

I followed your 7 steps in clearing cache, got stuck for a second in step 4. Everything went into wiggle mode at the bottom, but no "X" to press? The apps all had "-" on them and I did not want to delete any of the other apps, so after wiggle mode I just hit the home button again and went to step 5.

It does however seem to fix the problem. All of the TV Shows do appear properly now, so the cache must of cleared and the meta's must be happy again.

Just as an extra note, after everything was again working properly I added a couple more TV Shows on of which was not mete tagged properly and it threw everything off again.

I fixed the meta tag and cleared the cache again and it was back to normal again. So it appears that the cache can get off easily when adding new material. It would be nice if in settings there was a clear cache button. That would save a lot of time.

Soup,

For me, just using your 'steps 3-5' on their own worked. No need to mess with iTunes or your PC....(iOS 5.0.1 iPad2 w/ 300+ movies via Home Sharing). I also had the iPad plugged into my PC at the time, but im not sure that makes a difference. The main thing I think is clearing the iPad's artwork cache in the video.app, the iTunes file its originally reading from seems to be fine.

Regardless, this is annoying, and I suspect if I add something, it will jumble everything up again. Ill update my thread if when I try that. Thanks for the nice explaination.

-Kirk

Withing the last few days I added 3 more titles and the cache got all screwed up again.

This time I did as kirkpants and just followed steps 3 - 5 and it did fix it. Seems obvious

that the cache does not update or self delete properly when it need to.

I am still lost with step 4.

"Clear the Videos app suspended state (double-click Home to reveal multitasking bar, hold down Video app until everything goes into "wiggle mode" and then press the "X")"

Which "X" am I suppose to press?

Everything in the multitasking bar has an "-"

Apologies, OzzieMac, I was working from memory.

Press the red ”-” at the upper-left corner of the Video app to remove the suspended app from the multitasking bar and force a restart of that app.

Regards,

Steven