December 4, 2024

Describe Your AppleTV Media Using ATVFiles

Posted April 10, 2008 at 10:47pm by iClarified
These are instructions on how to give descriptions to the media on your AppleTV for use with the ATFiles plugin.

Notice how when navigating through your media only the title and size is displayed at the bottom left. We can change that!
Describe Your AppleTV Media Using ATVFiles

Step One
You must of course have the ATVFiles plugin installed before attempting this tutorial. You can find instructions on how to do that here


Step Two
Launch TextEdit from your Applications folder
Describe Your AppleTV Media Using ATVFiles

Step Three
Select Make Plain Text from the Format Menu.
Describe Your AppleTV Media Using ATVFiles

Step Four
Copy and Paste the following into your TextEdit window:

'
'.htmlspecialchars('
Title
Artist
Summary
Description
Publisher
Composer
Copyright
5
5
TV-PG
Series
Broadcaster
101
1
1
2006-01-01
2006-01-01
3600


Genre
Genre



Name



Name



Name

').'
'

Step Five
Now go through each tag and modify the content between the tags to accurately describe your media.

For example:
Change Title by replacing Title with the name of your media. ie 2012 Doomsday

Important Notes:
- The very first media tag() has set possible values. They are: "Song", "Music Video", "Podcast", "Movie", "TV Show", "Audio Book". The default type is Movie.
- Duration is only to be used as an override if the QuickTime scanning gets it wrong, otherwise it should not be used.
- Rating will display graphics for the usual ones (R, TV-PG, etc.)
- All tags are optional. Just omit the tag if you don't want or need it !

Step Six
Here is an example of what the input would look like for the 2012 Doomsday Movie.
Describe Your AppleTV Media Using ATVFiles


Step Seven
Select Save from the File Menu when you are done inputing your description.
Describe Your AppleTV Media Using ATVFiles

Save the file to your desktop with the exact name of the media file on your AppleTV but with an xml extension. For example if the filename on your AppleTV is 2012 Doomsday.avi then save your description as 2012 Doomsday.xml.
Describe Your AppleTV Media Using ATVFiles

If asked to confirm your file extension the click the Use .xml button.
Describe Your AppleTV Media Using ATVFiles

Step Eight
Now all you have to do is copy the xml file on your Desktop to the exact same folder as your media file on the AppleTV. ATVFiles will automatically retrieve your description and display it on the AppleTV.
Describe Your AppleTV Media Using ATVFiles

Notice the blank image above your description? Learn how to add cover art by following this tutorial.
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Comments (10)
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Thomas
Thomas - June 7, 2008 at 7:39pm
ATVFiles does not support those as far as I know. Those rating limits are something for the built-in movie player only.
Thierry
Thierry - June 7, 2008 at 6:16pm
Hello, I enabled parental controls with "TV-PG" threshold in the AppleTV general settings, with a four digit code.

I set "R" ratings to some TV episodes and the "R" icon is well displayed by ATVFiles, below the cover art, but there is no prompt for the 4-digit code...

Does ATVFiles really support TV/Movies ratings? What went wrong?

Thank you for your help.

Thomas
Thomas - April 27, 2008 at 12:55am
I uploaded a new version to the google code website. It no longer is required to have movies sorted per movie in a separate folder. It should now also work with one big unsorted folder. http://code.google.com/p/appletvdatamaker/
Thomas Silcox-Childs
Thomas Silcox-Childs - November 3, 2009 at 2:54pm
Anyone tried this app AppletvDataMaker lately? It does xml for me but writes zero byte image files. Cover Art does not work. Any advice would be appreciated.
Thomas
Thomas - April 14, 2008 at 5:43am
moe: it gets the TV data from tvrage.com as that was the first one I found to have decent data and an open API to use. Never looked at others (including Yahoo).
moe
moe - April 13, 2008 at 4:59am
@ Thomas: Thank you very much for this great app. I've used it yesterday and it worked greatly ! I owe you loads and it surly unlocks aTVFiles hidden features. And I appreciate you making the code available for all to modify. One question though, where does the app get the tv show data ? And is it possible to have Yahoo TV to generate the meta data implemented in the app ?
Thomas
Thomas - April 13, 2008 at 1:08am
crazyastro (and maybe others): I uploaded the latest version of my code to googlecode, so you can explore all dirty details. It is available at http://code.google.com/p/appletvdatamaker/ Enjoy!
crazyastro
crazyastro - April 11, 2008 at 11:12am
I also made an automated ruby script to do the same, and grab all the movie details from IMDb.
I will also make this available once it is more refined.
The existing MediaGrabber app didn't work at all for me, but I am excited to try yours out! :)
Thomas
Thomas - April 11, 2008 at 1:14am
There are some automatic tools available to make those files. I myself wrote one, which I do not really distribute nor support, but which can be found at http://www.degroote.org/AppleTVdataMaker.zip if you would like to try. It requires Leopard to run, mainly for the used php5 code inside. It can make the XML files, but also does download (Dutch) subtitles and movie covers. For series it does not download the covers, but makes screenshots of the movie. If someone is interested, I will distribute the source code for free.
crazyastro
crazyastro - April 11, 2008 at 12:52am
I use a "blank" XML file, edit it for each movie, and do a Save As. I think you should add Step 9: Copy over a JPG/TIFF/PNG file of the move poster, which you can easily find thru Google, etc. Note: The XML and JPG must have the same name as the video file (ie) Simpsons.avi - Simpsons.xml - Simpsons.jpg
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