AppleTV tips and bugs to be aware of...
As readers will be aware we brought into that AppleTV thing a while ago to complement the EyeTV setup from even further ago.
In the last few days I've had a few snag's with it that are probably worth letting the world know about. There are two items and both of them are bugs in the AppleTV software that are triggered by our setup.
- TV Show's get dumped into a "Various" listing rather than the show name
- AppleTV software crashes with some TV Show names.
Various TV Show
The symptom is that some episodes of a TV Show's may appear in a Show called "Various" even though other ep's rightly appear under the show title eg. "Hereos". It turns out this is the result of an old hangover from iTunes history.
I have the problem because I have the EyeTV recording shows and dumping them across to AppleTV on a automagically basis and because the TV Guide data is entered by humans at some point in the process and thus we end up with slight variations in the Artist fields.
Regular user of iTunes will have noticed that music tracks with multiple artists or even compilation albums with multiple artists get dumped by iTunes into a "Various" grouping. Well it turns out that if the Artist field has anything in it (rather than being blank) it must have the same value exactly otherwise being a computer it will slot it into that infamous "Various" slot. Bizarrely, if you have multiple shows with multiple Artist values you end up with multiple "Various" entries at the bottom of you TV Show's list on the AppleTV.
The fix is simple - select all of the episodes of a particular show, then type a command-i (-i) for Info.
If you haven't already turned off the Mulitple Items warning, click the "Yes" button. [By the way, the only way to uncheck that "Do not ask me again" option is to delete Users/yourname/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes.plist - come on Apple extract the digit. You can't even jump into Terminal and use a "default write" sort of trick because the preference is buried in amongst a range of other preferences that have all been lumped together...]
Once you've done this, select the Artist field then you can type in your desired Artist info - iTunes helps out here with a nice bit of type-ahead.
Long TV Show names
If a TV Show has a long name/episode id it will cause the BackRow software (the software that runs the AppleTV interface ) to crash when you try to play the TV Show - BackRow is restarted automatically so apart from a small delay the impact is minimal. So, how do you end up with ridiculously long TV Show names? Well as mentioned earlier, living in Australia the only way to get TV Shows in iTunes is via EyeTV (or a similar product)
The only way to watch a show, with a long name is to rename it in iTunes and let it re-sync with the AppleTV. The name/ep. id that crashed my AppleTV, as you will see is very long - the result of the show coming from EyeTV and the local e-guide having mistakenly put the description in the guides title field. The episode id. is "Hair Friday" not this long string::"Hair Friday: Join the playschool team to learn a little, while singing songs, listening to stories, making things, and going on adventures with Big Ted, Jemima and all the other toys."
Hope that helps some one else out there with a similar set-up or problem.
