Making Usable Dynamic Playlists for iPhones/iPod

Being a 1st gen 8GB iPhone owner I have adopted the endless struggle to create the perfect dynamic playlists for my TV shows that will update and change as i watch them. iTunes is able to make fairly good dynamic playlists for use on your iPhone, the following is the playlists and the rules i used to generate them to keep a fresh rotation of TV shows running through my iPhone.

The most important thing of course to begin with is to have your TV shows in a format that can be used by iTunes/iPhone. Unless you downloaded a show from iTunes its self chances are that it will be in .avi or a similar format that will be useless for iTunes. Deciding to take the plunge and convert all of my TV series to iTunes/iPhone compatible format i started the challenge of finding the best conversion software. I have tried everything available, iSquint, VideoDriver, VLC, Popcorn, etc. But the one that worked the best was Toast Titanium from Roxio. It was by far the easiest and best when it came to converting video on Mac OSX.

Over the last year or so i have converted most of my shows and imported and labeled them in iTunes. Good organization of your iTunes libraries really pay off when creating dynamic playlists. All of my hows have the Show name, the episode name, episode number, the season number, the year first aired, and the channel it was originally from. These labels greatly help the playlist process.

So once you have 937 TV show episodes (at date written) then what?

The most important playlist that gets uploaded to my iPhone is one I named ~iPhizzle TV (iPhizzle is the name of my phone). The ~ before the name allows it to show up first in my playlist list. The rules for the list are as follows:

• Video Kind Is TV Show: Make sure that only TV shows are added
• Time is greater then 9:00: This rule eliminates any shorts or intros, but still allows short TV shows like Robot Chicken.
• Play Count is less then 3: This rule assures that the shows that are on the list are ones I haven’t seen a lot.
• Show is not The Wire: I don’t want to watch episodes of The Wire randomly, this eliminates them.
• Show is not House: Don’t want random House episodes on there either.
• Rating is not *: This rule eliminates anything I marked as one star, which means i wouldnt want to watch it randomly.
• Genre is not Documentaries: Many of the documentaries i have are longer/larger, which would limit the number of shows on the iPhone.
• Last Played is not in the last 3 Months: Assures that i haven’t watched the shows recently.\\
• Limit to 1700MB: The size i have reserved for TV shows.
• Sort by Random: You got it
• Check Live Updating

And thats the list, so far it works great for the 1700MB i have reserved for TV Shows on my iPhone, the rest of the space is used for my music play lists.