Front Row Frustration

Let me start off by saying I love (well, loved) using Front Row to browse and use my media. I have over 1 TB of movies and TV shows on an external hard drive, converted to mp4 through VisualHub, and loaded on to iTunes on my Mac Mini. It is hooked up to my TV in the living room and is the main media source for me. I am running OS X 10.5.8 and iTunes 9.0.2.

My process is thus: I convert the .avi to .mp4, and VisualHub automatically loads in to iTunes. I then manually change the metadata depending on if it is a movie or TV show. For a movie, I clean up the title, add synopsis and artwork. For a TV show, I title it, add synopsis, add show name and episode number (under video tab- everything is season one with a running episode number to keep from having multiple entries for shows with several seasons), under the options tab I change media kind to TV show. Here is where the problem has arisen as of late.

Before, until I changed the media type to tv show, the file would reside under the movies section of both iTunes and Front Row. Once I changed it to TV show, then it would move to the corresponding show's list. It still does that, but any show list that I add a file to changes to either "Untitled" or "Various" even though the artwork I have applied for the series remains, and all the episodes are correctly named and ordered inside. They just aren't called "30 Rock" any more, they're called "Various" I have several "Various's" and "Untitled's" now, and it is frustrating.

The other issue is that once I change the name of the file from, for example, 30rock.s04e02.avi to "Into the Crevasse", as I mentioned earlier, inside of iTunes everything is organized perfectly. But inside FrontRow, in the Movies section (even though I have changed media type to TV Show) is a file called Into the Crevasse that will play just fine. So what this means is the 10 or 12 TV shows that I add one episode per week to my collection and change their names are now cloggin up my Movies list. I still have all the Movie files in there, but I have to weed through all of the named episodes of shows to get to them.

It has gotten so cluttered that I don't use Front Row anymore. I am still labeling and sorting and metadata-ing everything the same way because I'm type A like that, and I'm hoping that maybe a future update of either iTunes or FrontRow will fix this and I can go back to using it. It seems to me that it is a communication error between iTunes 9 and FrontRow. I don't want to revert back to iTunes 8, since I have an iTouch which (I believe) requires iTunes 9. Either way, I can't say for certain if the problems arose when I upgraded to 9... I don't recall.

So has anyone else had this issue, or am I the only lame-o still using Front Row? Most other forums have recommended using such-and-such media organizer program instead. Anyone know of a way to fix this?

Thanks
Hismikeness

I have to say that i have experienced exactly.... and i mean so exactly the same problem, i could have wrote your post for you. Right down to using visual hub.
I have tried the weird podcast fix, i have tried to minor success, removing and replacing after using 'metaz'. But to be honest, it has only occurred since the last update that i am annoyed that i have to change my way of just choosing media type, to some convoluted method of removing and re-adding that i think my beloved Apple should solve the **** problem which they caused with the update.

It seems rather odd to be honest. It seems like an unavoidable problem, but i have only read about this on a number of forums. not the mass google reports i would have expected. I guess i have just been adding more TV shows than your average joe.

I am still crossing my fingers for a fix. i can see no way around this one. I love Front Row, but this has made it unusable with all my tv shows amongst the movies.

in addition

Ok as a bit of an update, i would like to let you know how i am getting on.

I decided to start from fresh and by holding down the option key while opening itunes it asks you to open a library, or create a new one. So i created a new one. Upon looking at the work i would need to do (adding ALL tvshows back in to tvshows and music vids back to music vids etc) i decided that was waay too much work, and closed itunes, reopening again pressing the option key and choosing my old library again. The reason i mention this is that it had moved all video files in to the movie folder and even though i opened my old library again, it did not move them back to the tvshows folder until you click get info on each individual file. My way around this was to choose tv shows etc by bulk, so highlighting series one to ten of friends and choosing get info. then changing genre to comedy etc. This moved them all back to tv shows folder. When i am talking about folder, i mean the physical file system folder under finder.
Now back to the problem.
The tv shows were still showing up under movies and tvshows in FR. I did use metax and z and did not seem to get too much joy. however parsley is atomically delicious worked very well. It does bulk changing and when setting the type to tv show in parsley it seemed to stick in FR. i now have only a couple of series to go and my movies directory is looking cleaner.
I would like to get the process a bit cleaner, and maybe fiddling around with the library did not make a difference, but i thought it was worth mentioning.