Apple has raised the bar once again with iTunes 8. But it’s not all sunshine and daisies for all users, especially those that are mysteriously losing their HD shows during the download process.
Found in an Apple Support discussion thread, some users are reporting that iTunes is deleting their HD shows during the SD download process, leaving them with the lower-quality versions. “Based on the reports, the new version of iTunes seems to be having some difficulty handling HD and SD files with the same name, which leads to the HD version being overwritten once the SD download starts. That’s bad, particularly when you discover the bug after you’ve just downloaded a whole season of something,” Ars Technica explains. And they’re right. If a user pays for an HD download, he/she should receive that high quality content, or else the entire attempt is a bust.
Hope is not lost, as Apple has acknowledged the issue in an e-mail to a customer. Apple claims to be working on it, and until an official fix arrives, there are a couple of things you can try. Make sure that “Allow simultaneous downloads” is enabled in your iTunes preferences (in the Store tab). This hasn’t worked for all users, so if it doesn’t work for you, here’s another temporary solution. Immediately after you purchase a show from the iTunes Store, open up the iTunes Downloads section, and pause the SD show download. Next quit and restart iTunes, and enable the download. Because the file should be created with a different name, both HD and SD versions should be able to live side by side.
[via ArsTechnica]
