Q: I want to re-watch selected TV shows on the iPod that cover more than one season. How can I selectively add an episode without syncing the entire season which would cause me to run out of room?
– Stephen
A: There are a couple of ways you can go about this, depending on how you have your iTunes library set up and whether you want to watch these shows in order.
The most straightforward solution if you’re interested in re-watching an entire series from the beginning is to return to synchronizing your TV Shows by unwatched episodes, much like you may have done when you watched through the series the first time.
In this case, you would simply go into iTunes and reset some or all of your TV Show episodes as unwatched by selecting the episodes in question, right-clicking and choosing Mark as New:
Once these episodes are marked as unwatched, you can simply control synchronization of them to your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV by using the “xx least recent unwatched” setting in iTunes.
Alternatively, if you would like more control over which shows get synchronized to your device, you can create playlists containing the specific episodes that you would like to sync, and then simply set your synchronization options to sync selected playlists, rather than selected shows.
To do this, first create a playlist or set of playlists containing the episodes that you would like to sync to your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV.
You can either use a standard playlist and just add the individual episodes manually, or you can use a Smart Playlist to automatically select episodes based on criteria such as “Least Recently Watched.”
Once you have set up one or more playlists containing TV Show episodes, go to the “TV Shows” tab for your iPod or Apple TV (or “Videos” tab for the iPhone or iPod touch) and change the drop-down menu for “Selected TV Shows” to “Selected playlists”
The list of selected TV Shows will change to show a list of playlists which contain TV Show episodes. Simply select the appropriate playlists that you would like synchronized, ensuring the Sync option is set to “All” episodes, and iTunes will synchronize only the episodes contained in those selected playlists.
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