Thomas Fitzgerald's Mac and Technology blog (thomas-fitzgerald.net) has a nice, thoughtful piece on the Top 5 things Apple could do to make Apple TV even better. Some of his ideas make sense to the CouchGuy (adding an "Apple Video" section and supporting the iPod as a plug-in device to show up in "Sources" directly), while others (XviD/DivX support) seem well-intentioned but just wrong for Apple's overall Apple TV strategy. I applaud his decision to leave acting as a DVR off the list. I agree with him that this is a desirable function best left to third parties (though I would like to see those third party devices tightly and seamlessly interact with iTunes/Apple TV — and I expect that will happen very soon).

I am beginning to think that the number one item on my own list, however, is something I have not seen in many (if any) Apple TV wish lists. If I had the ear of the team developing the iTunes/Apple TV upgrade of the near future, I'd whisper one word into their ears — organization.

When you look at what you are syncing to the 40GB hard drive, the picture may not be too bad. After all, this is a more or less handpicked subset of your master iTunes library. But streaming works so well on the Apple TV (especially if you have an Ethernet or 802.11n connection from iTunes) that I'm not satisfied with a subset. I want it all at my fingertips — that's why I bought my Apple TV in the first place.

It was not until I took a scan down the Movies menu of Apple TV on my streaming list from GuyTunes (my primary iTunes Windows install on my HP Media Center PC) that I realized what I needed most once Apple TV was up and running was a little more — no, a lot more — iOrganization in my iLife. If your only source of content is what you download from the iTunes Store, you are probably golden. Everything comes properly labeled and organized. Go into TV Shows and you will see each show with its own submenu. But if you bring in a lot of content from other sources, as I do, you may face Chaos.

I use a plugin to automatically convert my TV show recordings from Windows XP Media Center and bring them into iTunes. I also have converted a lot of my purchased DVD content to iTunes compatible format — especially my extensive collection of animated TV series episodes. Managing what I took from iTunes into my 5G iPod for viewing on the go was easy — I unchecked anything I didn't want to sync and only took along a small group of shows at a time. But I bought my Apple TV specifically so I could have family room one-click access to everything in my iTunes library. And I forgot that I've not really spent a lot of time organizing that content. Oboy. I am so paying for that now!

Take those animated cartoon episodes from DVD, for example. The CouchGuy has dropped a lot of cash at Amazon on the whole set of DVDs for the Batman, Superman and Justice League animated series episodes, and taken them all into iTunes with Handbrake. (And if you snickered under your breath a bit when you read of my video preferences — watch 'em before you laugh, OK. That's some good TV, pal.) This stuff I couldn't buy on iTunes, but I wanted it for my iPod 5G and to watch on my iBook on occasion.

Along with Lost, Heroes and other series that I record in the Media Center (and supplement with purchases from the iTunes Store when I don't catch a particular episode for some reason), I also record every episode of Food Network's Good Eats with Alton Brown. That show is aired every evening, so I have quickly developed a backlog of episodes — well over a hundred. I have similar collections of other favorite series fare.

I carefully retitled all the Handbrake-secured material by episode number and title (because Handbrake has no way to self-title what it takes from a DVD) and Media Center automatically labels its own recordings with the name of the series and episode title. But the metadata iTunes uses to organize these files has to be added by hand to every episode, and I just haven't bothered to do it. I can easily find what I want by doing an iTunes search. But not on Apple TV... And all imported video content is labeled by default as a "Movie" by iTunes. Only in the most recent versions are you able to reset imported content to be treated as a "TV Show" so it can be organized as well as the iTunes Store purchases — and you must reset each individual file by hand. There is no way for me to select every episode of Good Eats and tell iTunes to see this as a single TV Series all in one stroke.

Utilities on the Mac side such as Lostify and Parsley is Atomically Delicious (yes, those names have meaning, but I'm not going to go into that here...) would be helpful — but there are no equivalent pieces of software for Windows, as far as I can determine. And iTunes should really be able to do it all.

My Movies menu streamed from GuyTunes is a nightmare, organized only alphabetically by title and including hundreds of TV Shows ripped from DVD with their filenames being composed of the episode number followed by the episode name. Naturally, they all come first in my Movies menu — all the #1 episodes, followed by all the #2 episodes followed by all the #3 episodes... arrrghhh! The ones brought in from Media Center have filenames starting with the series title so they at least are lumped together. But the episode titles that follow are often truncated in the Apple TV menu and I still have to scroll past hundreds of episodes of Good Eats to get to any Movies or TV Shows with filenames starting with H through Z. It never mattered before. I could search for what I needed in Tunes and keep only what I wanted to watch immediately on my iPod. It matters now.

Yes, I can eventually convert all of these "pseudo-Movies" into something iTunes sees as TV Shows — one freaking file at a time. But that will still leave a long, long list of purchased and imported movies organized only alphabetically by title, as well as a lot of miscellaneous stuff like YouTube videos captured with PodTube scattered in there willy-nilly. I want and need more organization to make Apple TV easier to use.

So here is my wish list for the next release of iTunes (with a concurrent firmware update to Apple TV)...

Let's start with the Main Menu of Apple TV. Currently there are seven menu items at the top menu level. Two, Settings and Sources are not actually categories, so really we have five types of content that Apple TV recognizes: Movies, TV Shows, Music, Podcasts, Photos. Any video that is imported into iTunes without a label is placed under Movies by default. For our future interface, let's create two new categories: Home Movies for family stuff and vacation video I bring in from iMovie and Other for all my YouTube-type miscellaneous video clips. Have iTunes prompt the user for a category when a video is first being imported, and when selecting multiple files for import at the same time, allow the user to choose to label them all the same way — or label none of them (which defaults them to Other). If you choose to label the imports as Movies, iTunes should default to taking the filename as the title. If importing multiple files as a TV Show series, iTunes should ask for and attach  the name of the series, and then title each episode you are uploading, by default, with the file name. If you want, you can choose nothing and let Apple send the file to Other, titled by the filename alone, for later updating in a more selective manner/

Under the Music category, Apple TV already does things the right way, automatically sorting Music Videos into their own submenu and duplicating the organization of the iPod by Playlists, Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres, etc. The iTunes Top Songs and Top Music Videos submenus are a nice touch, though I do wish you could order something previewed there downloaded to your selected iTunes account by clicking on the remote. The other content segment menus are not as fully developed, however.

Podcasts is organized by the individual podcast "series" listed alphabetically, with individual episodes listed as a submenu under each in reverse order by date of release. This seems pretty reasonable as far as it goes. The TV Shows top menu has a submenu with previews of Top TV Shows for sale at the iTunes Store, (but again with no way to order them from your couch). Under that is an alphabetical list of TV series, each with a submenu with the episodes listed. The Movies top menu has a Movie Trailers submenu and one for previews of the top iTunes Store movie downloads available. This latter menu again cries out for a way to Buy Now and have the Movie start downloading to your selected iTunes installation. All of these lack ways to further divide and organize your content to avoid those massively long scrolling menus. I have dozens of movies and hundreds of TV shows. My Music is organized by multiple categories — why not my other media?

What Apple TV needs are user-definable submenus under Movies, TV Shows and Podcasts (as well as the new Home Movies and Other categories). To enable a submenu in iTunes so it will show up on Apple TV, you would tell iTunes to create a new metadata category. categories show up in iTunes lists as a new column. Name the category column, then start labeling your content under that category. Each time you add a new label, iTunes would automatically put that label in the category's label list so you can reselect that label again for other files — or label multiple files at once by selecting all the files first, then assigning the label. Ideally, labels would be displayed as check boxes (unlike the current Genre entry in iTunes, which allows only one selection per file) so you could select several categories for a single file and have it show up in all of them. You could have a real Genre category for Movies and list Serenity as both SF and Western and Scary Movie as both Horror and Comedy if you choose.

Podcasts should have one predefined category into which all podcasts marked "Explicit" are automatically funneled. The user would have the option to lock off any category as a parental control. You could enter a password (using the same method as entering your wireless network password, or just require a short string of up/down/right/left remote clicks to unlock a "protected" category. This protection scheme could be clicked on or off for any category you set up in Movies, TV Shows, Music Videos, Home Movies and Other menu areas as well.

Finally, add three file-by-file indicator bits for all content files, which can be set individually or assigned to a whole group of selected files at once. The "NEW" bit is automatically set to "on" when a file is first added to the iTunes Library, and stays set until you turn it off manually or the file is played through. A "BLOCK" bit defaults to "off" and works like the checkboxes now in iTunes. If it is turned "on" the file will never sync or stream to Apple TV, even if the rules you have set for syncing would normally include it. This is for files you may want to store and organize in iTunes or drag individually to an iPod, but not show up in your Family Room. A "FAVORITE" bit works exactly the opposite. Any file with this bit turned on automatically syncs to the Apple TV, even if other rules set for syncing would exclude it. These three bits must be set and reset from iTunes, not from the Apple TV itself.

With these tools, a massive iTunes video library could be brought under control easily, for a much better viewer experience from the couch. Don't all of us CouchApples deserve that?