If you are someone that likes to rip their favorite episodes of TV shows from your DVDs into iTunes for later viewing on your Mac or iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad/AppleTV, you may have encountered a problem with Mac Os Xs media center called Front Row. First, if you have never accessed Front Row, you can do so by:
1) clicking on the Front Row application icon in the Applications folder
2) hitting command (⌘) and escape (esc) at the same time
3) if your Mac has a remote and a built in infra red sensor, then point the Apple remote at the machine and hit the MENU button.
Now, you may have all of your TV shows in the TV Shows section of iTunes, and the easiest get them there is to use the built-in iTunes method. When you add a home-ripped TV Show into your iTunes library, by default, it is imported into your Movies section. Usually, you must go to the Movies section, select a bunch of files that you want to classify as TV Shows, right click (control click) and Get Info, then in the Options section you can choose the Media Kind that iTunes should classify the file as, and in the Video section you can name the Show and the Season.
While this works fine for organizing TV Shows within iTunes, if you use Front Row (which accesses your iTunes library) the TV Shows can sometimes show up in the Movies section like in the following example. Here, episodes of the TV Show Beauty and the Beast are found in the Movies section of Front Row:
The solution I have found is to use one of Dougs AppleScripts for iTunes called Set Video Kind of Selected. Dougs AppleScripts are an invaluable resource for the Mac community. Here is how to use this script to fix this problem in Front Row:
1) After downloading and installing this AppleScript, go to iTunes and Navigate to your TV Shows Section.
2) Then, click on one TV Show, and then use Command(⌘)+A to select all of the TV Shows.
3) Now, click on the AppleScript Scroll in the menu bar (highlighted in red) and click Set Video Kind of Selected .
4) In the window that opens up, double click Video Kind, then TV Show, then click Done.
5) You will see a Done! window, and after clicking Thanks! you will be able to check Front Row to see that the problem has been solved. In the last image, you can see that when I scroll down to BE… in the Movies section of Front Row, it no longer displays my clients Beauty and the Beast shows in the movies section.
Thank you Doug for all of your hard work!
This has been tested on 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard.
