Why does iPad Video App Not Group TV Shows Correctly?

It's all about the metadata ‚ the track information stored in each media file.

A while back I had this problem with TV Shows ripped from DVD not displaying correctly, or not in the proper sort order, on my iPad. When I compared the metadata for my home-brewed files with those from files of episodes purchased from the the iTunes store, I discovered some differences. The solution that worked for me was to correct the metadata using the info pane for the media files in iTunes.

To get started, open iTunes, select one of the TV episode files that's giving you problems, and press ⌘ + i (or choose Get Info from the file menu).

Start with the Info tab. Ideally your metadata will look something like this, with obvious differences (unless your file happens to be the same episode of The Big Bang Theory):

Note that the track number corresponds to the episode number

Not all devices use the Info metadata for sorting though, your next stop is the Video tab:

Episode ID could also be expressed as S2E8 but I prefer the cleaner, numerical method.

Next, visit the Options tab to confirm that the Media Type is set to TV Show:

.

To assure consistency, you can select multiple files and edit common fields, such as Album (in the Info tab) or Show (in the Video tab) all at once.

Finally, it's sometimes useful to make change the criteria that iTunes uses to sort your media. You have guessed by now that the Sorting tab is the key to this operation:

In the example above, alphabetical sorts by episode will place this episode with the L episodes, not in the T's. This is useful for Movies, shows or bands beginning with The.

The laborious process of manually entering metadata for TV Episodes is the main reason for my using iVI to import DVDs.

After a lot of experimenting, I finally found a repeatable procedure that causes the shared library to group correctly on an iPad. Please note, there may be unnecessary steps in this procedure, but it does work. Note also, that this procedure works for iTunes 10.6.1 (7) runiing on Mac OS X Lion (10.7.3) and iPad Videos App in ios 5.1 (9B176) running on a first gen iPad.

All steps are done in iTunes on the Mac [Credit to Will of Apple Support who walked me through this procedure]

1. Select all the episodes for a given season of a given show.
2. Right click or Control Click and choose Get Info. You are now editing metadata for all the selected shows. There are four tabs: Info, Video, Sorting, and Options.
3. Fill out the each tab as illustrated, substituting the correct series name and season number as appropriate. Note the checks next to most boxes, even blank ones and those that are pre-populated, these ensure the identical data gets written to each episode. Note - I populated the artwork by copying an image to the clipboard and pasting in the box. I recommend using an image with the series name clearly visible as the image with Season X underneath it are the only thing displayed when browsing the shared library from an iPad (Series Name is not displayed).
4. Click OK

The key problem I found was entering different info in the Artist or Album Artist info. I had put the director's name of the episodes in there. While everything else was set up right (Album was the show name, episode ID, # and track # were all correct), I was still getting weird breaks on my iOS device. I removed the director's names and just entered them in Comments. I left Artist and Album Artist blank. Now I have one list for the show instead of three (from the three different directors). Kinda sucks to have to use comments, but it seems to work.

Hope this helps others for such a frustrating problem.