Why does iTunes make a mess out of my TV Shows library?

I'm not really sure where to post this, as it doesn't seem like Apple pays much attention to the official Apple Support Forums, but I'll give it a go nontheless.

The thing is, as most Apple TV owners I have to rely on iTunes for handling my media library in order to get it working towards my Apple TV (currently an Apple TV 3^rd Generation, Rev A) which is perfectly fine. I find iTunes to be very well organised and owning several OS X systems, only using iOS devices and everything my music library already consists of only ALAC (Apple Lossless) music tracks and I like to keep all my audio books in M4B (AAC) simply because it’s much better organized this way. As long as all the metadata is done right one can’t really complain about how iTunes is doing things other than the Windows version being rather slow when you start filling it up with content, the OS X version is vastly superior in terms of performance and overall stability but I guess that is to be expected.

I have absolutely no problems with my ALAC (Apple Lossless) music library, no matter how many tracks I add they are all there, with the correct metadata and everything. Same goes for my audio book library, the only ones being somewhat troublesome are those I’ve got in MP3 format instead of M4B (AAC) as they get automatically listed as music instead of audio books, but that’s fixed within a matter of seconds just marking them as audio book in iTunes metadata. My movie library, which used to consists of loads of self-ripped Blu-Rays encoded to MKV’s with either Dolby Digital 5.1 or DTS 5.1 is now repacked into M4V / MP4 containing Dolby Digital 5.1 (AC-3) and with the help of metadata downloaded from IMDB they are all listed correctly with the correct metadata, so all is good and dandy.

But when it comes to TV-Shows things starts to get messy. We are still talking about only M4V / MP4 files containing mostly Dolby Digital 5.1 (AC-3) audio tracks, and a few containing 2.0 AAC audio tracks. The problem is iTunes is making a complete mess out of things, no matter what I do.

Some TV-shows are added and shown correctly in my iTunes library, others are just not working out at all! Take my six seasons of LOST for instance. I tried to redo the metadata on the first six episodes of season 06, but they just won’t show no matter what I do. The weirdest thing with these episodes is that when I manually play the M4V files using iTunes, iTunes recognise them as LOST Season 02 episodes and not Season 03 episodes. So LOST Season 03 - Episode 01 which is "01. A Tale of Two Cities" is shown as LOST Season 02 - Episode 10 which is "10. The 23rd Psalm". That's quite odd, which was the reason why I went ahead and rework the metadata of these episodes just to be sure.

But still it won’t show in the iTunes library and when manually opening the M4V files with iTunes it still shown as being "10. The 23rd Psalm" instead of "01. A Tale of Two Cities". If I open the file with QuickTime Player, Windows Media Player or Media Player Classic Home Cinema they all list it as "01. A Tale of Two Cities" and not "10. The 23rd Psalm" as iTunes does. Watching the playback is making quite clear it's indeed playing back A Tale of Two Cities and not The 23rd Pslam episodes, even in iTunes.


I have no clues why iTunes is making a mess out of the first six episodes of LOST Season 03, it really doesn't make much sense as there is nothing with the M4V files, their contains or their metadata that points towards iTunes recognising it as a LOST Season 2 episode at all.


Just to confirm the metadata in iTunes I tried to remove the whole LOST series from my library and went ahead and added ONLY the first six episodes of Season 03 and nothing else. Then they are showing correctly, with the correct metadata for each and every episode.

But upon adding the rest of the bunch they disappear and suddenly iTunes starts mixing the first six episodes of Season 03 as Season 02 episodes...


As soon as I add any episode of LOST Season 02, 10-15 they seem to replace LOST Season 03, 1-6. So Season 03 is working perfectly, having all the right metadata and everything but as soon as I add LOST Season 02, Episode 10, LOST Season 03, Episode 01 starts playing as LOST Season 02, Episode 10 and then disappears from the library. Upon adding and playing back LOST Season 02, Episode 11 it replaces LOST Season 03, Episode 02 which then disappears from the library and this goes on for episode 10-15 of Season 02 which for some reason replaces episode 01-06 of Season 03.

This isn’t isolated to only LOST, same goes for a few of my House M.D season whereas iTunes is starting make a mess of things mixing metadata of Season 3 with metadata of Season 4 for no obvious reason. This is quite frustrating as this renders my Apple TV quite useless when iTunes is not capable of handling my media library correctly.

Several episodes are missing in quite a few of my various TV Shows as well, some requires me to manually open the M4V / MP4 while browsing my library for it to get listed as it’s not being added while adding the folder to my library.

This has been going on ever since iTunes 10.X, and it’s behaving like this on all my system it being Windows 7, Windows 8, OS X Mountain Lion or OS X Mavericks. Surely something has to be done in order to solve this? There is nothing wrong with my M4V / MP4 files as I’ve re-ripped them, re-encoded them, re-done their metadata and everything without any luck and consider it only happens with various TV shows and not with my music, audio book nor my movie library I see nothing pointing at it being a problem with my content but rather iTunes making it all fuzzy for no apparent reason.