User blog:RRabbit42/Season 1 in HD on iTunes, but....

Since Disney has been really slow in getting episodes out on DVD, most of us rely on iTunes to get the episodes if we don't have our own digital recorders. New episodes are available usually the day after they premiere on Disney Channel US.

iTunes did some rearranging of the episodes and it's a bit of good news, middling news, and bad news.

The good news: Season 1 is now available in HD format. Same pricing as for other HD episodes. $2.99 per episode or you can buy a season (or season pass if the season is not complete yet). Each HD episode you buy also includes a SD version that can be used on iPhones. If you bought the SD episode alone, that's $1.99 each.

The middling news: The iTunes definition of a season is now a "volume" of 13 episodes (actually 13 half-hours, since we usually see two episodes per broadcast), priced at $29.99 for the HD version, or $19.99 for the SD version. Our Season 1 is now split into Volume 1, from "Rollercoaster"/"Candace Loses Her Head" to "Crack That Whip"/"The Best Lazy Day Ever" and Volume 2 for "Mom's Birthday"/"Journey to the Center of Candace" to the Unfair Science Fair pair.

Our Season 2 is split up the same way. Volumes 3 and 4 have 13 episodes (including the Christmas Vacation and Summer Belongs to You specials). Volume 5 is marked as a "season pass" because it only has 9 episodes at the moment. Once "Split Personality"/"Brain Drain" goes on sale, that should mean there is just 3 episodes left before Season 3 officially starts.

Each volume comes with new album artwork. They are still promotional images, but at least there's a different picture for each volume. Whether the new album artwork will replace the existing image that was used for both season 1 and season 2 episodes has not yet been discovered.

The bad news: if you have already bought all of the episodes in Season 1 in SD format and now want them in HD format, there's no discount for that. You pay $2.99 per HD episode or the full volume price of $29.99 for each of the two volumes. In addition, it re-downloads the SD version of the episode(s), which takes extra time, and displays them as a duplicate entry in your episode list.

So, people that bought Season 1 already have to make a decision: "Is it worth $60 to re-buy the episodes just to have them in HD?" And it's a minimum of $60 because if you decide you can't afford a volume at a time and just buy a few episodes every so often, you'll spend another $17.74 by the time you're done.