Mini/BMW iPod Interface doesn't show all playlists

Question

The iPod interface that BMW created for the Mini Cooper is pretty dandy. It does have a few limitations, one of which is that it will not show more than 255 items in a list. Meaning, If I have 500 artists on my 160GB Classic, only the first 255 will be accessible using it. The same is true for songs/albums/playlists.
So, to make this long story shorter, I can only get the interface to display up to the 57th playlist. My understanding was it should show 255, based on the instructions.
I have the 160GB ipod classic, and planned to have issues accessing all the artists on it, so I made playlists. I figured if I pick my favorite artists, make "best of" playlists, as well as a bunch of mix playlists, I should be fine. Sure enough, made 'em and had around 90 playlists, none in excess of 255 tracks. I figured I'd connect up and be good to go!
Well, surprise, surprise, only half the playlists showed up. I was getting around 55 instead, and weird thing is that the last playlist would cut off part-way through.
So, last Saturday I spend a lot of time running back and forth between my Mac and my car rearranging the lists and trying to find the rhyme and reason behind what I could access in the interface.
To backtrack, I have the Sat Nav, and just got Sirius installed last week as well. The software is definitely as up-to-date as it can get for now.
Anyway, to make a long process a shorter story: it turned out the playlist list (CD 1) is not solely based on items inside the folder. I don't have the exact number, but the number of playlists is based upon the number of tracks in them, up to around 5000. For example, if I added tracks to a playlist that appeared earlier alphabetically, it would cause the number of songs in that last playlist to decrease by the number of songs I added. If I shorted or removed lists from the top of the order, the number of lists added at the bottom was based not on the number of lists I deleted but the number of tracks in those lists.
I also wiped my 160GB iPod and re-did all the playlists, cleverly titled "Test 1" through to "Test 25."
The result: I could see 20 playlists, each averaging 240 tracks. Around 5000 tracks again. This doesn't seem to be an issue with my iPod, it seems to be the adapter.
Anyway, this wasn't what I expected, and so I give the warning to those with very large libraries that there really is no good way to access all your music without a great deal of advance planning, and even then the best you seem to be able to do is access 5000 of your tracks. Which is actually a ridiculously large amount of music, unless of course you have 11,000 on your iPod and got the interface expecting to be able to access just about everything. However, for most users, it is still a pretty great product.
If anyone finds they have a different experience with their ipod adapter, I'd love to hear about it. I sure hope it's not a situation specific to my car. If there's anything anyone out there can think of that might help from the iPod side of things, please let me know, otherwise consider this a word of warning to avoid the MINI/BMW iPod adapter if you have a large library!

Answer 1

i don't think "all" unwatched appear in there.. only some portion... at least that is how it has worked for me. since i've re added a bunch of my movies a littel while back to the library (after adding meta data to them) unwatched would be something like 100+ movies which likely wouldn't be a good thing if they were "all" listed there..