Thursday, March 8, 2012

Unable to Prevent iTunes From Downloading Videos

I just “purchased” 13 free TV episodes from iTunes on my Mac. I don’t want to watch them on the Mac, but I find it easier to browse on the big screen and click with the mouse than to use iOS or that sharp aluminum remote. I just wanted to get them into my “queue” for easy viewing later.

But iTunes insists on downloading them, multiple resolutions for each episode, and I can’t figure out how to make it stop. I’ve tried pausing the downloads and deleting them. I’ve unchecked “Always check for available downloads” in the preferences. I’ve deleted the temporary files in the Finder and restarted iTunes. No matter what I do, iTunes keeps restarting the downloads.

As far as I can remember, iTunes has always worked this way. The only “solution” seems to be to let it finish downloading and then delete the videos. I’d rather not fill up my SSD, waste bandwidth, and use up my Comcast quota.

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Add them to your wish list and purchase them off of that on Apple TV.


@Jesper That’s what I should have done, although it still seems like more steps than should be necessary. The other problem this causes is that iTunes fully saturates the network connection, which sometimes prevents me from using Safari or Mail.


Some throttling would be nice, yes.

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