How is the personal library displayed on Apple TV?

[Molson1020]

So I am in the process of ripping all my DVDs/Blurays to a hard drive in ATV format and will be buying one eventually. I've searched HIGH AND LOW for how the Apple TV 3 displays movie info from your personal library and cant find a thing.

Can anyone take a photo/video to show? It'd be really appreciated.

 

[orestes1984]

Once you chose "computers" It's menu driven

You go into movies and then there is 3 ways of sorting it... By genre (useless), by movie and finally whether or not you've watched it (useless). If you choose to sort by Movie, the only usable format imho, it gives you everything in your itunes library in alphabetical order.

I suppose if you had an extensive library and your tags actually worked correctly (they don't) sort by genre would be ok, but how extensive are we talking?

 

[orestes1984]

 

[Molson1020]

Awesome, thanks orestes1984!

What do you mean when you say "tags don't work?" I've been ripping and tagging using iFlicks.

 

[chenks]

Awesome, thanks orestes1984!

What do you mean when you say "tags don't work?" I've been ripping and tagging using iFlicks.

tags work fine, don't know what that other poster was talking about.

 

[mic j]

Tags work fine. Only thing I can think of is the limitation to the description field size and there is no field for year produced. I use Subler to do the tagging and I eliminate the data fields which I have no interest in. Doing that expands the description field a little bit.

 

[Omne666]

I use iFlicks extensively but will say that the actors field is not used by iTunes for display purposes, so I have to copy and paste them into the artists field for them to show up on the ATV.

I do hope I'm not the only one experiencing this, as I have no idea of what I'm doing wrong if that's not the case.

 

[mic j]

I use iFlicks extensively but will say that the actors field is not used by iTunes for display purposes, so I have to copy and paste them into the artists field for them to show up on the ATV.

I do hope I'm not the only one experiencing this, as I have no idea of what I'm doing wrong if that's not the case.

Must be an iFlicks thing. I used Subler and it's "actors" field puts the data in the "artists" field of the iTunes metadata.

 

[orestes1984]

tags work fine

I mean it in the sense that there isn't really any set genres so your movies end up all over the place in terms of genre if you sort them by genre. It might be OK if you had a large library but I don't and I don't want to have to go through 10 menus to find one incorrectly caregorised movie in terms of its genre.

This is particularly the case when a movie can fit into 3 or 4 different categories and why computers are not good at determining this. Is it an adventure? sci-fi? fantasy? This is where it doesn't work. You think it would be an adventure movie but it has been tagged as scifi, you might think its a thriller but it's been tagged under suspense.

On a side note Subler is great, it puts all the metadata into the tags that you will need for it to come up on an Apple TV.

 

[mic j]

I mean it in the sense that there isn't really any set categories so your movies end up all over the place in terms of category. It might be OK if you had a large library but I don't and I don't want to have to go through 10 menus to find one incorrectly caregorised movie.

This is particularly the case when a movie can fit into 3 or 4 different categories and why computers are not good at determining this. Is it an adventure? Sci-Fi? Fantasy? This is where it doesn't work.

On a side note Subler is great, it puts all the metadata into the tags that you will need for it to come up on an Apple TV.

I know what you mean about categories. I think the problem lies in the downloaded metadata may have several category descriptions (drama, action, romance, as an example). The aTV sees that as one whole category vs 3 separate categories. I've had to set up my own category system to limit the number of category options or else the "by category" view is almost as long as the "by movie" view. For instance I have, drama-action, drama-romance, drama-history, adventure-action, adventure-romance, etc.

 

[Cinephi1e]

I use iFlicks extensively but will say that the actors field is not used by iTunes for display purposes, so I have to copy and paste them into the artists field for them to show up on the ATV.

I do hope I'm not the only one experiencing this, as I have no idea of what I'm doing wrong if that's not the case.

I am not sure how iFlicks works, but in iTunes the "Artist" tag is used only for sorting purposes and not for displaying. There is a separate "Actors" tag which you can access with other programs, such as Subler, along with other tags (Director & Producer) which will be displayed on the Apple TV. If you looked at the tags on purchased movies from iTunes, the "Artist" is most commonly used for directors, but sometimes for producers or studios.

 

[DP812]

ATV's home display is just terrible. Hulu Plus has cover flow, Netflix has grid, the iTunes Store has a combination of grid and coverflow, and home sharing has only Front Row. Without even search box or even the option to jump to a letter. It makes it extremely tedious to look through your own library.

With each update, I keep hoping they'll fix this, but then each update comes and goes without any fix. I've actually got more faith in an ATV3 jailbreak than I do in Apple doing something about this.


In regards to iFlicks, there is a spot for actors (although their auto-fetch puts them in a really bizarre order). These will show up on your ATV display, but you can't search by actors (you can't search by anything, it seems).