How do I stop Archos Video Player treating some television shows as movies?

Question

When Archos Video Player scans the "Television" folder on my microSD card it treats some of the shows as television shows but some of them as movies. As a result, it tries to (badly) to match the titles to movies and then ends up displaying them in the "Movies" section of the app instead of the "Television" section.

How can I get it to treat everything in the "Television" folder on my microSD card as a television show?

Further details

My folder structure on the microSD card is as follows:

• Movies/Title (year)/Title (year).m4v
• Television/Show/Season X/Show - S0XE0Y - Title.m4v

One example is Postman Pat- Special Delivery Service/Season 1/Postman Pat- Special Delivery Service - S01E20 - A Surprise.m4v which is treated as a movie and displayed in the "Movies" tab as Dreamship Surprise - Period 1. I would expect it to be shown in the "Television" tab, as it should be.

This misidentification of TV shows is not limited to specific shows, seasons or episodes. It doesn't appear to matter if you have complete MP4 metadata or none.

Answer 1

After further digging, it turns out that if the video file has the ©nam atom populated, Archos Video Player will consider the file to be a movie and use that value to search TMDb.

In the example I provided, the video file had the value A Surprise which was the name of the episode. Since the app incorrectly treated it as a movie, it performed a search for A Surprise on TMDb and the first result was Dreamship Surprise - Period 1.

To add further confusion, if there are no results from TMDb then Archos Video Player resorts to (correctly) treating it as a TV show. As a result, it can look quite random as to whether or not a video file is considered a TV show or not!

Should you need to force Archos Video Player to treat certain video files as a TV show, then you need to remove this value.

To do this:

• On Windows, right click on the file, select Properties then the Details tab and ensure that the field called Title is empty
• On Linux, install AtomicParsley and run AtomicParsley filename.m4v --title "" --overWrite

Once you've done this, the video file will now be correctly treated as a TV show.