I’ve noticed that movies purchased in iTunes/the TV app now download on the Mac in a new HLS format, unless you really step down the quality so you can get m4v format. The HLS file format doesn’t seem to work with Home Sharing, which is how you used to be able to stream purchased content from your Mac to your Apple TV and other devices.
Is Home Sharing now dead for 1080P and higher movies? How are people handling keeping a local library of content purchased from Apple?
I believe the reason for this is surrounding the DRM that’s embedded into the movie files. HLS also seems to be their streaming format since so much of what Apple (and others) is doing is just streaming the content to you on demand rather than downloading the full, physical file.
Thanks for the reply. So after testing this some more, it appears only newer movies download in the HLS format. I still get m4v with older things. The HLS files are multi-gigabyte in size, a bit bigger than the m4v format. If I go back to my very old 13 inch MacBook Air, which runs High Sierra, I can get the m4v version even on newer content. It works to copy it over to my newer Mac — the TV app can’t find it at first, even if placed in the same folder in place of the original HLS file, but then it works after I use the prompt to locate a missing file.