iTunes deleting SD copies of high-def TV shows? Not for me.
- September 12th, 2008
- 3 Comments
Apple forums are churning right now with reports that when a user downloads a high-def TV show via iTunes 8, either the HD version or the free, SD version deletes itself upon completion due to a duplicate name. Since the reports are everywhere, I set out to replicate the self-deletion and report back to you with screenshots, only to find that it didn’t happen.
I started the free Office HD episode. Took about an hour to download the 1.83GBs of data.
The SD version finished first and created a file named “01 Fun Run, Pts. 1 & 2.m4v.”
Shortly there afterwards, the HD file finished. This one followed the standard OS X naming procedure for duplicate files and named itself “01 Fun Run, Pts. 1 & 2 1.m4v.”
So there it is and they work fine for me. Both files are living well on my iTunes 8, 10.4 OS X system.
Any readers experiencing this duplicate file deletion that these apple forum users are up in a tussle over?
Luke Noel-Storr (Who am I?)
2 months ago
The report you posted says it’s going to an external USB drive, which could be the clue.
I wonder what format the drive is in, and if that is a factor. Or if simply being an external drive is the issue.
zerock (Who am I?)
2 months ago
odd, this doesn’t happen to me.
Jesse David Hollington (Who am I?)
2 months ago
I suspect this problem was due to the fact that SD and HD versions of the same episode had identical internal cnID values (basically an iTunes Store catalog ID) in order to keep them “matched up” for the sake of selecting the correct version for different devices, and ensuring that play counts were properly tracked.
Further, I think it probably came down to a timing issue in terms of when the episodes arrived, or what order they arrived in, which is why it wouldn’t affect everybody. When downloading new iTunes Store content, the Store header information is actually in an Info.plist file that lives alongside the download and is stamped into the downloaded file by your local copy of iTunes once the download completes as an additional processing stage, which is also the same time the episode is moved to its permanent location within your iTunes Music folder. With duplicate IDs, it’s possible that if iTunes was processing both episodes simultaneously, they would trip over each other.
Although I never had this problem either, I think Apple has “fixed” it for newer content by generating a unique cnID for each version, which now has the downside of leaving the SD and HD versions unmatched, at least in iTunes 8.0, so now they both sync to the Apple TV (and try to sync to the iPod or iPhone, resulting in an error concerning the HD version).