720p for keeps: iTunes gets HD movie downloads

By Tim Conneally | Published March 19, 2009, 7:03 PM

Apple has turned up the juice on its iTunes movie store and now offers HD downloads of Hollywood motion pictures.

To download HD movies, users must have iTunes 8.1, which was released to coincide with the launch of the third generation iPod Shuffle last week. This is the first time movies can be purchased in HD through iTunes. Prior to this, only certain television content was available for purchase in HD, while H.264 movies in 720p were only available for rent.

HD downloads cost $19.99 and come with a standard definition version for mobile consumption. The whole package will consume between 4 and 5.14 GB of drive space.

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Yikes.

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HAHAHA wait.

$20 for a file?! What the f*** are these idiots thinking?

NOT TO MENTION it's still get DRM! F*** YOU APPLE!

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what? why is DRM apples fault again? They don't own the movie rights. 20 bucks is stupidly expensive though for something that consumes your drive space at the same resolution as a standard dvd. It's like a convenience charge for ripping it directly.

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