AppleTV and sorting TV Shows

Question

I've been wondering how to organize my shows by Show, then season and then episode because I have, for example, 6 entries for Bones (one for each season), 7 for Star Trek TNG, etc. and it just looks like a mess (Imagine if you had all 22 seasons of The Simpsons), is there something else to clean this up?

Answer 1

So far the best solution i've found with an ATV2 is just to use playlists. The files themselves are named ShowName.S01e01.ext, then i've sorted each show into a playlist so that I can watch them continuously without going back to the menu between episodes.

Answer 2

You can enter in sorting values for files in the Info window. Select a file and click File>Get Info will open the window, just go to the Sortingtab where you will find two columns, the left being the actual value and the right being the "Sort" value. So, for your TV shows, you can enter "Star Trek: TNG 1.1", "Star Trek: TNG 1.2", "Simpsons 1.1", "Simpsons 1.2", and they will all appear in the correct order in the list.

Answer 3

THe problem is, that ATV "overrules" the sort field ("Sort Name") entry with it's "Date Added" or air date value. The sorting only has effect as long as the "Date Added" values are the same... Unfortunately there is no way to change this tag in iTunes and no other sort option in ATV (1st gen) other then Show, Date or Unwatched available...

Answer 4

Only the first generation did what you're suggesting. I was very disgruntled to learn that newer (HD) AppleTV incarnations did away with this feature. I have hundreds of TB of shows and it's annoying as hell to scroll through a list of multiple seasons, rather than a list of shows.

Your only real option is to number each episode (ex. 1-100) then select all episodes, "GET INFO" and override the season option. Leave it blank. Then when you click on a THE SIMPSONS you will have one long list of episodes in order. It won't be broken down by season, but at least the list of shows will be cleaner.