When one of my friends, Yash, told me that the HD TV shows he’d bought from the iTunes Store had disappeared from his hard drive all by themselves, I’d figured he must’ve set some preference wrong or made some sort of a mess only he can make. However, it turns out that it’s actually a bug in iTunes 8 itself and is affecting a lot of users. There seems to be some infighting going on between the SD and HD downloads.
Apparently, when iTunes downloads the HD and SD versions of each episode together, it somehow manages to overwrite the HD version with the SD one because they have the same name. I know, it makes no sense. For one, even if the names are same, both files are of different type and have different extensions. For another, the SD version should finish downloading before the HD version does.
Anyway, even though the problem is not entirely clear, Justin Berka over at Ars Technica has a couple of suggestions. One of them is to make sure that the “Allow simultaneous downloads” preference is enabled (which it is by default) in your iTunes preferences. This, I guess, will ensure that the SD and HD versions begin downloading at the same time and the SD version gets there first. However, this “fix” hasn’t worked for everyone.
Another thing you could try is pausing the SD download and quitting and relaunching iTunes. Now when you resume the SD download, it will create a file with a new name (random stuff like “stuffy cows” and “mathematical magicians”, we hear) and both files should stay put on your hard drive once they’re done downloading.
Needless to say, neither of these are actual solutions and we’ll have to wait for Apple to update iTunes for that. I still can’t wrap my head around how such a bug could exist in the first place. Surely someone at Apple must’ve downloaded a couple of episodes in HD and tried them out before unleashing it onto the world? Or maybe NBC has thrown in self-destruct mechanisms in their HD files as a way of getting back at Apple—who knows!
While we are at it though, can some iTunes expert among the readership help me out with a tiny little, slightly unrelated, problem? When I download an HD show from the store, I only want the HD version, so I pause and delete the SD download that starts alongside it. However, whenever iTunes checks for pending downloads, it starts re-downloading those files that I do not want. I’ve accumulated eight such downloads already and it’s frustrating to have to keep canceling and deleting them repeatedly. Is there any way to tell iTunes to forget them permanently?
"I've accumulated eight such downloads already and it's frustrating to have to keep canceling and deleting them repeatedly. Is there any way to tell iTunes to forget them permanently?"
I had this happen once with a free video from the store. In the end, I let it finish downloading, and then deleted it from the hard drive. I'm not sure if there is another shortcut.
There is no way around it -- you have to allow the SD download to complete, or it will plague you until the end of time.
The pending download issue has been bugging me as well. Even I have 8 pending downloads (weird that we should both have the same figure eh?) that automatically start at random.
I'm pretty sure iTunes 8.0.1 is gonna hit the streets real real soon. The changelog?
*Performance enhancements and bug fixes*
From what I've read, the reason it downloads the standard reason is so that you can load it onto your iPod and watch it on that. Every time one purchases the HD version it will also d/l the standard for that reason.
I don't know of a way to tell iTunes to cancel it permanently. Since the iTunes store registers the standard version as "purchases but not-downloaded" I think it will keep trying to get you to download. Josh's solution is the way to go.