For many people, iTunes has one major flaw - it’s only possible to organise and play TV shows which were purchased from the iTunes store. For people over in America that’s no problem, but TV shows haven’t made it to Europe yet and that means showing them on your iPod or Apple TV isn’t quite so straight forward. I had several TV shows in the form of DivX AVI files - Scrubs, Friends and Lost to name a few - which I wanted to be able to play on my new Apple TV. This is the process I go through to convert them to the appropriate format, and tag them with season information and artwork:

Step 1 - Convert the files

iTunes isn’t happy with handling DivX or AVI’s, so we need to convert that file to one that is compatible with iTunes - MP4. There are several ways to do this, one simple on is using Quicktime and exporing the file to Apple TV. However the best method I’ve found is a program called Visual Hub. It’s about £10 but really is well worth it for the quality files it produces. These are the settings I use:

These convert video at a good quality resolution with fairly high settings. For me, filesize isn’t really an issue - quality is more imporant - so these work well. It generally takes a little less time to convert the file than it would to actually play it, that’s on a Macbook with 2gb RAM, you may find the time varies.

Step 2 - Tag the files

Once you’ve got your nice MP4 file, we’re nearly there. At the moment, if you drop that into iTunes it will think that it’s a movie which is fine if it’s a movie you’ve converted, but if it is a TV show you need to alter it’s embedded data to give some information about the TV show name and series etc. A great program for doing this is called Lostify. This is completely free, and lets you tag a TV show with all the relevant information - it’s really easy to use. This is a shot of the interface:

Once you have run your files through this tool, just drag and drop them into iTunes. You’ll have a great collection of TV shows in no time, all of which stream to and look great on your Apple TV.