Note to all: avoid iTunes videos that you must pay for like the plague.<\/p>\n
I had been wanting to watch some Portlandia<\/a> episodes , and last night tried to with iTunes video. Big, big mistake. After<\/em> charging me $2.99 and commencing the download, iTunes sneeringly informed me that I could not watch said video on my computer, and then launched into a paragraph of arcane technobabble that even I could not understand at first.<\/p>\n Apparently, some lame copy-protection scheme mandated by the Hollywood studios considers all but a select few Macs a piracy threat, presumably because the digital video signal going between the system unit and the monitor could be used to create a decrypted, free copy of the video.<\/p>\n Of course, that’s no excuse for iTunes’ bait-and-switch behavior. iTunes could obviously tell if the system it was running on was unacceptable to Hollywood (hence the message); there’s no reason whatsoever for not sending it before<\/em> you pay for a video and start the download. None except pure greed on Apple’s part, that is.<\/p>\n While researching the issue, I came across a comment in passing that mentioned BitTorrent and pirated copies of videos. A light went on. I downloaded BitTorrent<\/a>, downloaded an AVI video player<\/a>, typed in a few Google keywords, and within a matter of minutes BitTorrent was merrily downloading the content Apple had previously defrauded me for. Content which actually played.<\/p>\n And the BitTorrent download proceeded far faster than the iTunes download had. Just for yucks, I tried it again with another episode and that one arrived promptly and without issue, too.<\/p>\n Way to go Apple and Hollywood: you’ve successfully made it so difficult and risky for customers to pay for content that they opt for the easier option of pirating it instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Note to all: avoid iTunes videos that you must pay for like the plague. I had been wanting to watch some Portlandia episodes , and last night tried to with iTunes video. Big, big mistake. After charging me $2.99 and commencing the download, iTunes sneeringly informed me that I could not watch said video on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capitalist-scum","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}