iPhone + iTunes Fail

[Burnsey]

It's Canadian Thanksgiving and I've travelled from my place to my parents' place with my iPhone 6. For the trip back, I want to transfer a couple of TV episodes that I've downloaded on my Parents' Macbook Air onto my iPhone so that I can watch them on transit.

My iPhone's home sync computer is my own Macbook. When I connect it to my parents' MBA, it's asking me to erase and sync for iTunes to be able to transfer these two TV episodes. Is Apple serious? They want to erase all my apps, music, photos, etc...?

Why do we keep putting up with and supporting this ****?

If veteran users have any alternative solutions please let me know. It's laughable that I have to jump through extra hoops just to get the content I want onto my device.

To Apple: playing these games with your customers is not a smart business strategy, especially now with more and more competition.

 

[roguebear]

It's Canadian Thanksgiving and I've travelled from my place to my parents' place with my iPhone 6. For the trip back, I want to transfer a couple of TV episodes that I've downloaded on my Parents' Macbook Air onto my iPhone so that I can watch them on transit.

My iPhone's home sync computer is my own Macbook. When I connect it to my parents' MBA, it's asking me to erase and sync for iTunes to be able to transfer these two TV episodes. Is Apple serious? They want to erase all my apps, music, photos, etc...?

Why do we keep putting up with and supporting this ****?

If veteran users have any alternative solutions please let me know. It's laughable that I have to jump through extra hoops just to get the content I want onto my device.

To Apple: playing these games with your customers is not a smart business strategy, especially now with more and more competition.

This drives me insane as well, but this behavior has been around since the initial iPhone. It goes back to the fact that Apple iTunes initially used DRM to protect the media they downloaded. The idea was you couldn't just connect your iPhone to your friends computer and load everything they had on it onto your device, circumventing the licenses. Now, iTunes music is not DRM protected, but I'm pretty sure the video files still are (or at least the rentals are), and they don't want one person to pay and then share it with everyone they know. I understand they're trying to protect their licenses, but its super annoying. It used to come up when I bought a new laptop and my new one didn't have all my old music. I finally bit the bullet and had to lose some of the older albums I had just so I could sync it with my new computer.

(This is actually one of the biggest reasons I was hesitant to move into the Apple ecosystem. I like that on android devices you have access to the file system and you can just connect and drag and drop whatever you want. In the end, I had enough invested in Apple that it made sense, but I'm still not happy about it.)

In terms of actual solutions, I don't know what format the shows you've downloaded are in, but you could potentially upload them to dropbox and then download them on your device by marking them as favorites for offline viewing.

 

[Delmar]

I have been wanting a solution to this for a while now. Maybe someone here knows of something.

 

[Night Spring]

Use another media player app. There are plenty of free ones on the App Store.

Yes, it's a bother, but I believe it is there to discourage people from sharing media. Otherwise I could go to a friend's house and copy all his walking dead episodes or whatever.