stripethree

A disappointing first try at iTunes movie stores rentals.

First, navigating the store to figure out what movies could be rented was a pain. Apparently there are a lot of movies that can be bought but not rented. I don’t get it and I didn’t bother to look up why. Trying to watch previews was hopeless, they would load and play audio, but the video would hang, which would turn out to be a taste of things to come. It also took 5 tries to get the download to actually work, and hopefully that didn’t result in five charges to my credit card. I will have to check tomorrow. The iTunes store kept resetting the connection and I had to start all over. It is worth noting that this was being done on a computer with wired connection and I’m pretty sure whatever the issue was, it wasn’t on my end. So we finally get the thing downloaded and settle down to watch it. More disappointment. The video frame rate is horrendous with the movie skipping badly, I’m guessing we were getting 1-2 frames per second, if that. The audio could keep up, but not the video. I thought, well, maybe the Cube (450Mhz PPC, 768Mb RAM) can’t handle this so I tried to play it on the Powerbook. Same problem. Then I thought, wait, the Cube plays other movies all the time even ones of similar size, without a problem. Sure enough, I brought up some video of similar size and quality to the movie I just downloaded and it played perfectly. From a networked drive at that.

I started to hit Google about this issue and found that it is a known issue with no real fix or even response from Apple. Not good. So there goes the $4 and 3 or so hours of my time trying this out. I won’t be back anytime soon unless I hear of massive improvements. I was hoping this would turn out well, instead, it seems I will resign to subscribing to NetFlix.