iTunes Rentals Quick Review

I got around renting a movie yesterday on iTunes, this will be short I promise. I started wondering which movie to rent and ended up renting Live Free or Die Hard, not a bad movie, I wish I would have watch it in the theaters when it was out. I encounter some issues on my way to renting the movie but once the movie started downloading, I had no other problems.

When I first hit rent movie my iTunes stalled, it took around a minute to come back and when I hit the rent button again it behaved the same. I restarted my Mac mini, got to iTunes, and hit the rent button again, it took me to a page that within iTunes and said that the user agreement changed and I needed to agree to the new one.

After that it prompt me if I was sure I wanted to rent the movie, it prompt another message saying that my account was going to be charged and the movie started downloading. At first, the download process was very slow, so I waited to hit play. When it was 33MB into the download and the times started to decrease I hit play and had no other issues watching the movie.

I have a 22-inch display on my Mac mini and stereo speakers, the experience in regards to the image quality and sound quality were exceptional. I enjoyed the movie, which was a good choice for a first rental, since is an action pack movie and fast-paced scenes behaved well. I noticed two glitches on the movie but I’m not sure if it was the movie or my Mac mini or the streaming, it could have even be some background work like time machine, at this point I’m not sure.

I transferred the movie to my iPhone and the process was smoothly but I notice a couple weird things. Now every now and then iTunes is taking longer to switch from rental tab to music tab to iTunes store tab, I’m sure you get the point. My feeling is that iTunes is checking for the time left of the rental which I think it will be inconvenient if you rent a lot at the same time.

On my iPhone, the movie looks great, note that the movie instantly disappeared from my Mac mini once it transferred and since I stop watching it at the credits it started just there when I hit play on my iPhone. Keeping Steve honest about whatever he said on the keynote. Feel free to contact me if I missed anything and you have questions, I’ll be talking a lot about this, the new iPhone update, and Office 2008 for Mac in the following articles.