Choppy playback for iTunes movies

For 9 months I have been trying to resolve this issue, and I have literally tried everything on this message board and a dozen others. A solution that seems (for now at least) to have worked for me is related to the initial Apple troubleshooting article, which says that if you have a SATA hard drive, iTunes will misbehave. The solution appears to be to put your purchased iTunes videos on a USB stick or external drive that is NOT a SATA type.

If you you want to see if you have a SATA hard drive, go down to the Start menu, type in Device Manager in the search box. Once there, expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller option, and if you see a device that includes the name SATA, then that could very well be the issue, and no amount of audio changes, resolution changes, preference options, and restarts will fix the problem. So basically, just copy/paste your purchased media to an external disk, and run the videos it...it's a hardware issue, so there's not much iTunes or any other software changes can do about it.

This literally has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

Playback is smooth on the same video, on the same computer when using something else to play the video.

VLC, Windows Media Player, etc.

The same video plays fine on a Mac (any Mac).

I have the same issue when playing content streamed from my OS X Server (i7 Mini, Drobo 5D).

Actually since the 11.2 update a couple of weeks ago I have successfully watched 2 movies and 4 TV shows in 1080p without stutter. (I had huge problems prior to 11.2 and had tried all of the recommended fixes).

Can someone else try upgrading to iTunes 11.2 to see if they see improvement? (I still wont believe it until a full month or two of flawless playback)

Let me apologise in advance for this moan. I have a three week old i7 Mac mini, I rented the HD version of the lone survivor, which is a great film, only to experience this picture chop issue, so I went on this forum only to find out that there are a lot of people having the same problem, I just couldn't believe it. I have a full HD 5.1 surround sound setup, which includes an xbox one, a playstation 4 and a stand alone blu ray player. I recently rented an HD movie from the xbox video store which should of been in 5.1, it wasn't, it played back in stereo. So after speaking, tweeting and online live chatting to several different customer support staff I found out that the issue wasn't at my end, the problem still hasn't been resolved. Another wasted movie experience. Moving on to the playstation 4, a slightly different issue with them, but still a movie breaking problem. My point is that we are paying for a service which is being heralded as the future, I don't want to sit down and have to go in and change settings, use different HDD's, spend hours talking to customer support, I just want to watch a **** movie which I've payed HD money for. Am I going to risk purchasing a product from any of these companies when I have no confidence that I am going to get what I payed for, the answer is no. When I put an old fashioned Blu-ray Disc into my player it works every time, perfectly. I don't want these companies to cure cancer (although it would be nice) I just want them to provide the service that they are advertising. REALLY, you want to pay thousands of dollars or pounds for what is effectively making our home entertainment experiences worse. REALLY.

Like I said I'm sorry but I'm sick of it. I used to embrace technology, know I feel like these companies are letting us down. It's 2014, not 1914, we can go into space, build space stations, rule the world with the latest military hardware, can we watch an HD movie without issues, NO.

Let me apologise in advance for this moan. I have a three week old i7 Mac mini, I rented the HD version of the lone survivor, which is a great film, only to experience this picture chop issue, so I went on this forum only to find out that there are a lot of people having the same problem, I just couldn't believe it. I have a 40 mbps fibre optic internet service ( which doesn't make much difference anyway as i try to download instead of stream) a full HD 5.1 surround sound setup, which includes an xbox one, a playstation 4 and a stand alone blu ray player. I recently rented an HD movie from the xbox video store which should of been in 5.1, it wasn't, it played back in stereo. So after speaking, tweeting and online live chatting to several different customer support staff I found out that the issue wasn't at my end, the problem still hasn't been resolved. Another wasted movie experience. Moving on to the playstation 4, a slightly different issue with them, but still a movie breaking problem. My point is that we are paying for a service which is being heralded as the future, I don't want to sit down and have to go in and change settings, use different HDD's, spend hours talking to customer support, I just want to watch a **** movie which I've payed HD money for. Am I going to risk purchasing a product from any of these companies when I have no confidence that I am going to get what I payed for, the answer is no. When I put an old fashioned Blu-ray Disc into my player it works every time, perfectly. I don't want these companies to cure cancer (although it would be nice) I just want them to provide the service that they are advertising. REALLY, you want to pay thousands of dollars or pounds for what is effectively making our home entertainment experiences worse. REALLY.

Like I said I'm sorry but I'm sick of it. I used to embrace technology, know I feel like these companies are letting us down. It's 2014, not 1914, we can go into space, build space stations, rule the world with the latest military hardware, can we watch an HD movie without issues, NO.

>> Like I said I'm sorry but I'm sick of it. I used to embrace technology, know I feel like these companies are letting us down. It's 2014, not 1914, we can go into space, build space stations, rule the world with the latest military hardware, can we watch an HD movie without issues, NO. <<

we can go into space

The United States no longer has manned access to space. Perhaps you are referring to China or Russia.

only to experience this picture chop issue, so I went on this forum only to find out that there are a lot of people having the same problem, I just couldn't believe it.

There is good news coming!

Technology experts are working on a movie storage system where YOU have physical possession of the movie. This system stores the movie digitally on an optical disk system that will not be dependent upon a congested, complicated, and fragile network. Because all of the data is stored only a few feet from your television, all the bottlenecks are removed. Performance and reliability are virtually flawless.

Further, the system will not utilize any form of security codes, authentications, or passwords. Once the optical disc is purchased it can be moved around freely at will, and can even be lent or given to friends and neighbors with zero hassles.

And if you don't like the movie, you can sell it for close to your purchase price!

I Was trying to put the choppy playback into perspective, with the references to space travel ect, it's not about the U.S or China, I'm from the U.K anyway.

thats great news that you shared there, my only trouble with it is that we were promised all the wonders of being able to watch something as complex as an HD movie on the the technology we have at the moment and guess what, we can't. So what makes you think it will work on the stuff you're talking about. I know this is an Apple site but I have been having surround sound issues on my xbox one, having spent over an hour on the phone with microsoft they believe it's an issue at their end, it's not been decoded in the correct format, I would say that's quite a big error, on the xbox forums there are people complaining about the same issue. The same with sony and the ps4. So going back to my 3 week old Mac mini, why are we lead to believe that thesae devices will do all this streaming HD and surround sound stuff when they don't. I don't know about you but I've spent a **** of a lot of money on all this tech and it isn't working how its been advertised.

I have solved the problem on my laptop. It actually has nothing to do with your settings in itunes. It is actually a sound driver setting for exclusivity which was doing this. I disabled this and the choppiness has disappeared.

A lot of posts here, I recently had the same issue and read through all these and here is what I did to fix the issue.

1. Ensure Windows, Quick-time and iTunes audio are the same (that's ALL THREE). For me it was 24 bit and 44100 it might be different for you just make sure they are set all the same.

2. In iTunes make sure the playback is set to the right preferred video version. I set mine to 1080p, iTunes>edit>preferences>playback>preferred video version

It was for many months that I could not watch anything on iTunes and now for the moment I can. This fix worked for me. If anyone wants some more detailed help on how to set the windows audio settings just post here and I will do my best to help as I know just how frustrating it can be when wanting to watch a movie and you cannot.

Anyway good luck 🙂

Something very odd - I was having the same choppy playback issues on all my personal videos imported from my iPhone on my Windows 8.1 (64 bit) machine.

I saw all the post about changing the audio settings, etc.

All I had to do was install the latest version of iTunes and viola - the videos played flawlessly - even in Windows Media Player - go figure.

Maybe it installed some proprietary audio codec after installing iTunes... not sure but installing iTunes fixed the choppy video playback on personal videos for me.

I aligned the bitrate to 24 and 48000 Hz, and it looks like the sound is now more in sync with the video.

I actually have a tougher question now. When watching fast motion video on iTunes, the framerate is low, and there is significant jitter and lag in the video. It is still watchable, but I am a bit of a purist (given I am paying $14 for an HD video) and don't know why it isn't much smoother. I have a Samsung 55 4K UHD HU9000 hooked up (HDMI) to a Windows 7 64 bit HTPC running 2160p with a GTX760 video card. The video itself is still 1080p ( with DRM unfortunately enabled) iTunes purchased movie, so I have to run it on iTunes (version 12.1 64 bit .. quicklime doesn't even work when I try to start it directly).

Moving to 2160p is not to be taken lightly, and I have seen lots of issues you have to deal with (particularly scaling the tiny font in lots of apps). Chrome had serious performance issues playing video until I installed a native version of flash and had to tell Chrome to not use the default version it came with ... no issue with flash compatibility with Apple 🙂

Is it that I am just asking too much of my video card and need to upgrade? Is there still thunking code changing back from 64 bit to 32 bit somewhere deep in iTunes? Is Apple in a vast conspiracy intentionally making it run slow so I will buy an Apple hardware product?

BTW Media Center (running a Silicon Dust Home Run ... which is awesome) plays beautifully, Superbowl was very smooth with absolutely no lag (with the exception of Ricardo Lockette).

HI Facepalmmonkey,

I had this exact problem after renting an HD film from itunes.

I used itunes NOT quicktime to view the film

I am not very computer savvy however I found reducing my screen resolution to the lowest option (800x600) solved the problem.

I have a rather basic 5-6 year old computer so I am unsure if it was just my laptop at fault and not itunes.

The only drawback is that reducing the screen resolution also reduced the picture size.

However this was better than watching a very slow and choopy film for 2 hours.

Hope this is some help?

I Have had trouble playing iTunes movies and shows since I bought an Asus laptop with windows 8 in 2014. I had since upgraded to windows 10 but continued to have the same trouble. I've Followed several of the articles in this post and the one which I believe worked best was syncing the audio playback settings to 24 bit and 48k In iTunes, QuickTime and BoTh audio adaptors installed in my laptop, one is the Realtek HD and the other is integrated with the HDMI. I have my system set to use the Realtek HD by default.

one final note, prior to doing this, I was monitoring performance and saw that the hard drive and memory usage were nearly maxed out while trying to watch an hd movie. I killed iTunes and let the system settle down before retrying, I suspect windows was trying to install updates or something, but after that and performing the changes, movie was golden.

I had choppy movie playback, these are iTunes digital copies that came with Blu-rays. I have a Windows 7 64 bit computer. I play movies via HDMI on my 60" panasonic TV.I fixed it by going into QuickTime and changing video playback from DirectX to Safe Mode under QuickTime preferences..

I am running Windows 10 and had problem with choppy playback. As suggested by zerostatetechnologies, I set both my windows settings to 24 bit and 44 Hz as well as iTunes and this cleared up the problem.