Apple phasing out m4v downloads

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Daniel Smith

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  • #1
    I gave up on Apple movie purchases/downloads years ago because I could see where this was going, but I was sad to see this discussion in MacRumors:

    https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-tv-movies-some-download-as-movpkg-filetype.2355658/
    It appears that m4v downloads are being silently phased out in favor of 'movpkg' files, which seems fine as an unimportant encoding detail, except, based on my reading of the thread i) 'movpkg' files can't be played on any other device, or even on the same device if you handle them wrong, and ii) Home Sharing can't see them, even though they're right there in the TV app.

    In other words, this looks like the death of personal digital movie libraries as far as Apple-DRMed movies are concerned. Your cloud library is your library, and all you can do with it locally is Netflix-style black box downloads.

    Anybody on here have similar/contradictory experiences? Any official word from Apple about what's going on and what functionality they intend to support in the future?

    Would love to see an Ars article digging into this in more detail.
     
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    OrangeCream

    OrangeCream

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  • #2
    Have you tried disabling lossless encoding?
    https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...aded-as-movpkg-files-instead-of-alac.2329227/as an Apple Music subscriber, if your preferences are to download music in high-resolution formats, it will download as a MOVPKG.

    If you disable high-resolution downloads in Apple Music's preferences, it should switch to M4A

    That was mentioned in your posted link. Also people have successfully downloaded mp4 even now so it seems like a bug and not a feature.
     
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    Daniel Smith

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  • #3
    OrangeCream said:
    Have you tried disabling lossless encoding?
    https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...aded-as-movpkg-files-instead-of-alac.2329227/as an Apple Music subscriber, if your preferences are to download music in high-resolution formats, it will download as a MOVPKG.

    If you disable high-resolution downloads in Apple Music's preferences, it should switch to M4A

    That was mentioned in your posted link. Also people have successfully downloaded mp4 even now so it seems like a bug and not a feature.
    Click to expand...
    To be clear, I don't have a problem to solve here, it just seemed like a notable policy change.

    Yes, you'll see lots of people in the thread fiddling with different download quality checkboxes, mostly unsuccessfully. The change seems to be that doing so is less likely to have an effect.

    It does seem somewhat arbitrary and bug-like, but what I've seen myself is it tends to be tied to more recent titles. I assume the internal policy is something like: after macOS [13 or whatever], movies added to Apple's servers after [date] and/or that make use of [HDR/4k/whatever] will no longer provide an m4v.
     
    OrangeCream

    OrangeCream

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  • #5
    Daniel Smith said:
    To be clear, I don't have a problem to solve here, it just seemed like a notable policy change.

    Yes, you'll see lots of people in the thread fiddling with different download quality checkboxes, mostly unsuccessfully. The change seems to be that doing so is less likely to have an effect.

    It does seem somewhat arbitrary and bug-like, but what I've seen myself is it tends to be tied to more recent titles. I assume the internal policy is something like: after macOS [13 or whatever], movies added to Apple's servers after [date] and/or that make use of [HDR/4k/whatever] will no longer provide an m4v.
    Click to expand...
    I assume the following; having worked in SQA:
    • Does platform support HD streaming? Yes
    • Initiate HD stream (movpkg); show user the play button
    • Has the HD stream completed? Yes
    • Assemble movpkg stream data into an mp4 file
    It's the 100% HD stream completion that is the issue. You can stream 99.9995% of the movie and you would be missing the last 10 frames and you would never know the difference.

    However if you're missing the last 10 frames then you can't successfully convert from a stream to a file.
     
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    Scud

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  • #9
    OrangeCream said:
    So which is the bug? Not all downloads are mp4, or not all downloads are movpkg?
    Click to expand...
    You tell me? Nobody except you is claiming it to be a bug. Looking at the linked thread, this is a change that Apple implemented sometime last year when they shifted to HLS streams (along with some interesting limitations on what can be streamed via home sharing). The very last post in that thread states you can download m4v if you do the following: "check "Download Multichannel Audio" along with selecting "Most Compatible HD (1080p)".
     
    OrangeCream

    OrangeCream

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  • #10
    Scud said:
    You tell me? Nobody except you is claiming it to be a bug. Looking at the linked thread, this is a change that Apple implemented sometime last year when they shifted to HLS streams (along with some interesting limitations on what can be streamed via home sharing). The very last post in that thread states you can download m4v if you do the following: "check "Download Multichannel Audio" along with selecting "Most Compatible HD (1080p)".
    Click to expand...
    Right, and there are other people who has reported the ability to grab both or either so it’s not clear why the behavior is inconsistent.
     
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