I like my Apple TV a lot but, like reader Bill Harris, as I accumulate more media to stream to it, I find navigating the thing increasingly difficult. I’ve come up with a way to cheat my way through organizing movies, and it’s a system that Bill might find helpful. Specifically, he asks:
I have so many movies streaming to my Apple TV that it takes five minutes to scroll from A to Z . Is there a way to add folders of Movies and have them display as folders?
For this technique to be successful you have to suspend your disbelief and by that I mean you have to be wiling to temporarily accept that a movie is actually a TV episode. It’s like this:
iTunes and the Apple TV don’t organize movies into folders for the obvious reason that most movies aren’t episodic— Star Wars , Harry Potter , and Lord of the Rings being the clear exceptions. However, they’re more than happy to organize TV shows into folders. Therefore the solution is to lie.
Just open iTunes on the computer that holds your movies and select the first movie you’d like to drop into a “folder.” Choose File: Get Info and in the resulting Information window click the Video tab. From the Video Kind pop-up menu choose TV Show. In the Show field, enter the letter you’d like to file the show under — A if you’ve chosen Aladdin, for example. Click the Next button and repeat for the next movie and on and on until you’ve run through your movie collection.
Now when you choose TV Shows in iTunes’ Source list, you’ll find your movies organized into sections by the letters you’ve assigned to them. Switch on your Apple TV and stream content from this computer and your movies will be organized into lettered folders.