Last month, I started watching the last three seasons of The Wire on my PC. I got a VGA cable and sent the video output from my little netbook to my new receiver (which I bought specifically because it has a VGA input). But, my netbook would only do standard def, and iTunes would do this thing where it would play the video for ten minutes or so then the video would stall, and after a second or two the audio would go silent. After a few seconds, the video would resume, but in fast forward, to catch up where the clock said it should be. Then the audio would return. And it would do this three or four times per episode. Annoying.

So, I did what every normal person would do: I bought a new laptop. I bought a decent model, with pretty good specs, dual core, HD display, etc.. That improved the picture immensely. But, the video stalls still happened. And they were worse, once we started watching Breaking Bad, which is in HD.

OK, maybe it's a network issue. Maybe the videos are stalling because the power-line network connection to the NAS where they reside is too slow to keep up with the display. So, I copied one of the files to the laptop's HD. Nope, I still got the video stalling.

Nothing useful turned up when Googling, but lots of other people report the same issue when using iTunes.

As an experiment, I bought one of the Breaking Bad episodes from Amazon's streaming service. It worked fine. Streaming from Amazon gave better results - better picture quality and no video stalls - than locally-hosted iTunes files. Problem solved.

But what the fuck is wrong with Apple that they can't get iTunes to play local videos on brand new hardware without annoying stalls, while streaming the same video through a Flash-based plugin works fine?

So, now we're onto Game Of Thrones, on Amazon. iTunes can suck it.