Apple TV 3 Tags

[ciberpuppi]

Like many of you, I've accumulated thousands of movies and tv shows that I've been streaming through my now-retired Apple TV 1. I skipped ATV 2 and bought a pair of ATV 3s for my den and bedroom and so far, I love the extra processor power!

My major complaint is the way the new ATV 3 seems to manage my "tags" when I stream "TV Shows" from my computer. For some reason, some major tags, such as "Actors" no longer appear, although the episode or show synopsis does.

Has anyone figured out how to adjust this or will we simply have to live with this until the next software update?

Also, the TV Shows used to be under one major "tag" for each show, with the seasons exposed only after clicking on the show. For instance, you would see "MASH" - click - Then see "MASH: Season 01", "MASH: Season 02", etc. Now, the seasons themselves are in the main menu, which makes my list seem endless. Any thoughts on this?

C-Pup

 

[mic j]

Like many of you, I've accumulated thousands of movies and tv shows that I've been streaming through my now-retired Apple TV 1. I skipped ATV 2 and bought a pair of ATV 3s for my den and bedroom and so far, I love the extra processor power!

My major complaint is the way the new ATV 3 seems to manage my "tags" when I stream "TV Shows" from my computer. For some reason, some major tags, such as "Actors" no longer appear, although the episode or show synopsis does.

Has anyone figured out how to adjust this or will we simply have to live with this until the next software update?

Also, the TV Shows used to be under one major "tag" for each show, with the seasons exposed only after clicking on the show. For instance, you would see "MASH" - click - Then see "MASH: Season 01", "MASH: Season 02", etc. Now, the seasons themselves are in the main menu, which makes my list seem endless. Any thoughts on this?

C-Pup

A couple ideas. Take a few of the files that have no actors but a description and open them in Subler. Check what the metadata fields shows. I found that all of my movies had the actors under Artist instead of Cast. iTunes metadata fields basically make no sense. I corrected mine to always have the actors under cast. You can modify the rest of the metadata to meet your needs as well.

For the tv show organization, I have mine organized in iTunes per by:

TV Show/Episode #/Name

and they show up on the aTV as you would expect.

 

[heisenberg123]

Like many of you, I've accumulated thousands of movies and tv shows that I've been streaming through my now-retired Apple TV 1. I skipped ATV 2 and bought a pair of ATV 3s for my den and bedroom and so far, I love the extra processor power!

My major complaint is the way the new ATV 3 seems to manage my "tags" when I stream "TV Shows" from my computer. For some reason, some major tags, such as "Actors" no longer appear, although the episode or show synopsis does.

Has anyone figured out how to adjust this or will we simply have to live with this until the next software update?

Also, the TV Shows used to be under one major "tag" for each show, with the seasons exposed only after clicking on the show. For instance, you would see "MASH" - click - Then see "MASH: Season 01", "MASH: Season 02", etc. Now, the seasons themselves are in the main menu, which makes my list seem endless. Any thoughts on this?

C-Pup

well sounds normal or mine is at least doing the same

when I'm in "movies" i get actor names, director, producer, genre, length and description.

TV shows i have the all listed on the main screen IE( Breaking Bad Season 1, breaking bad season 2, etc)

than for episode info i get

description, length, added, aired, episode/season #

 

[ciberpuppi]

A couple ideas. Take a few of the files that have no actors but a description and open them in Subler. Check what the metadata fields shows. I found that all of my movies had the actors under Artist instead of Cast. iTunes metadata fields basically make no sense. I corrected mine to always have the actors under cast. You can modify the rest of the metadata to meet your needs as well.

For the tv show organization, I have mine organized in iTunes per by:

TV Show/Episode #/Name

and they show up on the aTV as you would expect.

Opening the files with Subler confirms that the actors are listed under "Cast". I must conclude that the only change is something with the current Apple TV 3 software.

BTW, I've used MetaX all these years for my tagging; not that it should matter.

C-Pup

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

It's the UI software in the "3". Like you, I also miss how the "1" (first gen) managed some of this kind of stuff. For example, with the "1", you could tag multi-episode movies (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, Harry Potter, etc) with a single name in the "Show" field so that they would show up as a single line in the list of movies in the UI. More simply, take all of the Star Wars movies and metatag them as desired but put "Star Wars" in the "show" field. In the list of movies, only "Star Wars" would show up unless you selected it to click into the list of the 6 films. For me this is much preferable to the "3"s model of ignoring "show" and just listing all of the movies in a single long(er) list.

Apple would do well to review the past UI and resurrect such features. Not everything is made better by arbitrarily doing away with useful functionality.

While they are at it, I miss having "my movies" in "movies" (instead of "computer"), "my TV shows" in "TV Shows" (instead of "computer"), etc. From an intuitive standpoint, it seems that movies (itunes or ours) should be under the "movies" header, TV shows under the "TV shows" header, etc. How can it make (intuitive) sense for all that to be under a header called "computer"?

Gen 1 had some great UI functionality that will hopefully come back in some future update.

 

[mic j]

It's the UI software in the "3". Like you, I also miss how the "1" (first gen) managed some of this kind of stuff. For example, with the "1", you could tag multi-episode movies (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, Harry Potter, etc) with a single name in the "Show" field so that they would show up as a single line in the list of movies in the UI. More simply, take all of the Star Wars movies and metatag them as desired but put "Star Wars" in the "show" field. In the list of movies, only "Star Wars" would show up unless you selected it to click into the list of the 6 films. For me this is much preferable to the "3"s model of ignoring "show" and just listing all of the movies in a single long(er) list.

Apple would do well to review the past UI and resurrect such features. Not everything is made better by arbitrarily doing away with useful functionality.

While they are at it, I miss having "my movies" in "movies" (instead of "computer"), "my TV shows" in "TV Shows" (instead of "computer"), etc. From an intuitive standpoint, it seems that movies (itunes or ours) should be under the "movies" header, TV shows under the "TV shows" header, etc. How can it make (intuitive) sense for all that to be under a header called "computer"?

Gen 1 had some great UI functionality that will hopefully come back in some future update.

If viewing local media is painful enough....maybe we will opt to buy/rent from the iTunes store!!