Lastly, the strangest thing I learned in my investigations was that it appears improperly labeled metadata for one show can affect the display properties of a completely different television show as well. Making matters worse, some publishers include the season number in the name of a show’s title, like “The Walking Dead Season 2” which causes problems when an iPhone or iPad polls for how to display the program. Because the season 2 episodes use ID numbers that conflict with those in season 1, Home Sharing freaks out and in this instance displays the series out of order. Both season 1 and season 2 have the correct season metadata set, but the individual episodes have duplicate episode ID’s. ![]() In the above example you can see that I have downloaded two seasons of the BBC series Sherlock. Mis-numbered or conflicting episode ID’s, especially within the same TV series across multiple seasons, throws iTunes into a tailspin and leads to problems. Finally, to make matters worse, often times the metadata of a TV show isn’t set consistently by the publisher from season to season or even from episode to episode. In addition, there appears to be a quirk in iTunes where if values of a television show’s metadata (like episode ID) conflict with other episodes of that same TV show, the series simply won’t display in Home Sharing. This two-tierd level of sorting can be extremely confusing for the user since it’s not always obvious how iTunes decides what comes first, second, third and so on. The root of the trouble seems to be that unlike movies which are stand alone entities, and songs, which can be part of an album, TV shows are not only broken down by series title (the TV version of an “Album”), but also by season. Selecting a song, movie or TV show in iTunes and then getting information on it (cmd-I) will reveal the file’s metadata and allow you to edit it. What is metadata? It’s the information that is assigned to a file in iTunes such as the show’s title, season number, episode ID and so on. I read several support threads at Apple that explained how a TV show’s meta data can confuse iTunes’ Home Sharing feature if not set correctly. I recently spent several long nights experimenting with my iTunes media library learning what was causing some TV shows to appear multiple times, others appear out of order and some just not at all. When this happens, it’s impossible to select the series and episode you want to watch making Home Sharing effectively useless. Furthermore, certain TV show seasons will display multiple times or even worse, simply not appear at all. TV shows don’t always display in the proper order when browsed on Apple TV or iDevices via Home Sharing. Unfortunately, TV shows are a whole different story. Movies are listed alphabetically by title and music arranged into playlists that can be navigated and played easily either via Apple TV or an iDevice. When browsing music and movies via iTunes Home Sharing, media is displayed as one would expect. Home Sharing should allow me to get quick access to all of them any time I want. I own lots of TV show episodes, some I’ve ripped from my DVDs and some purchased directly from iTunes. Simply connect to your Mac’s media library via the Videos app, select the shared library and iTunes will present you with a list of all of your movies and TV shows. ![]() If you have Home Sharing turned on and a solid Wi-Fi connection, you don’t need to fill your iPad with movies and TV shows you’ve downloaded to watch them. ![]() ITunes Home Sharing is a wonderful feature that’s designed to let you share media libraries between multiple Macs, iOS devices and Apple TV.
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