Posts Tagged ‘iTunes movie rentals’

---

iTunes Movie Rentals and device syncing

So, before I left San Francisco, I rented Pirates of the Caribbean 3 to watch on the flight and I synced it to my iPhone this morning. Actually, I started the download process yesterday afternoon, because the bandwidth in my hotel was so poor, but I digress. Anyway, the rental process was very easy and moving the file over was just as I expected. It’s a 1.8 GB file, so moving it over via USB takes a few minutes.

What seems to happen though, is the file is moved from iTunes to the device, rather than just copying it over. When I got home and wanted to watch the end of the movie on my computer (rats…because Apple TV hasn’t been updated yet to support rentals…), I saw that my iPhone sync was copying the 1.8 GB file from the iPhone back to iTunes.

Presumably, in the future, when you want to finish watching it on an Apple TV or other device, you’d have to copy it over yet one more time. I don’t understand why Apple doesn’t just keep the master rental file in iTunes for the full rental time, and copy it out to devices (rather than move), and retrieve the state (watched/complete, or semi-watched) and timestamp of where the viewer left off.

Okay…reading back the above is confusing myself.

Of course, there are really only two likely normal use cases of iTunes Rentals. 1) You rent the movie in iTunes and watch it on your computer completely or sync it to a device and watch it completely. 2) You rent it on your Apple TV and watch it completely there.

Still the use case I’m describing (that just happened to me) can’t be too uncommon: You rent a movie in iTunes and sync to a iPhone/iPod and partially watch it. You get home and want to finish watching it on your Apple TV.

So, the way iTunes handles rentals transfers, I will have moved my ~2 GB file 4 times. Once when you download it, another when you sync it, again when you re-sync it back to iTunes and finally synced out to your Apple TV.

Whew.

Am I over thinking this? Or does it seem that just leaving it in iTunes all the time to begin with fixes a little bit of the wait?

January 19, 2008 at 12:38 am by . | 24 Comments.

---

iTunes Movie Rentals starting to trickle in

iTunes Movie Rental titles started to show up slowly overnight, replacing some of the placeholder titles iTunes web developers had presumably stuck in to test the Top Rental module (some which were not for rent, by the way).

I’m trying to decide what movie I’m going to rent for my iPhone and my 4+ hour flight back to Cincinnati Friday. On the way here, I watched a movie I purchased, but renting is what I really want to do.

I wonder what this will look like on my iPhone display.

Hmmmm… Suggestions?

January 16, 2008 at 12:55 pm by . | No comments.

---