A run-in with Apple’s movie rental service leaves The Grouse longing for cable
Posted 03.18.2008 at 3:37 pm
17 Comments
Horrors! Online movie rentals aren't supposed be this hard.
iStockphoto
It was in the third hour of a bewildering odyssey into the iTunes rental wilderness (I and my crew were fiercely at arms with a six-foot DVI cable) when a quote I had read in the paper earlier that day came back to me with sudden, crystalline truthiness. It was in a brief New York Times piece recounting a staged talk between ex–media mogul Michael Eisner and polymath Mark Cuban at last week’s SXSW Interactive conference.
Briefly, Eisner stated that within five years Internet-streamed video content would be as big a player as the current product from network and cable TV. Cuban politely scoffed and more or less called bull–pucky, saying that the current infrastructure and the insane technical complexity and sky-high bandwidth required to do so meant it would be several more years before that milestone were reached. At the time, I thought it a rather short-sighted sentiment, especially for someone so tech-savvy as Cuban. I mean, everyone’s doing Web video now—the future is already here! There are dozens of video services out there, and big guns like Netflix and iTunes by all accounts have nailed it…right?
Related Articles
 | The Grouse: Where is My Mind? |
 | The Grouse: 5 Stages of iPhone Grief |
| The Grouse: The Inkjet Refill Racket |
Tags
Entertainment & Gaming, The Grouse, apple, itunes, Jon Chase, movie rental, The Grouse, TVAnd then I returned to the computer for a few more hours of bloody battle.
Here’s how I was brought low by my own hand: I’d been curious to give the recently announced iTunes Store movie rental service a spin. It seemed like a nice alternative to paying $15 or more for a download of a movie I’d likely only watch once, and what the heck, it’s a Sunday night.
Now, I don’t own an Apple TV, and my desktop Mac is far from my living room TV, where I’d want to watch a movie with my wife. So, I broke out my old G4 Titanium laptop so that I could download a movie to it and then plug it into my TV and home stereo for a more cinema-style feel. My G4 warhorse is dated for sure, but it still runs fine, has 1.5 gigs of RAM, a reasonable graphics card and I had used it to edit a feature length film using Final Cut Pro, so it should be fine with any video issues. I figured all I’d need to do was update my iTunes and Quicktime software.
After a quick perusal of the 1,000 available titles, I settled on The Bourne Ultimatum because it’s awesome and after having seen it 6 months ago my stomach had finally settled from all the herky-jerky camera movement and fast edits and I was ready for nauseation again. I hit “rent,” put in my password and boom, it started downloading—only 1.3 gigs to go! To avoid any bottlenecking while watching, I let it go for 15 minutes while I connected up the S-video-to-composite adapter cable to my TV and audio to my receiver.
Smug with satisfaction at showing my wife how great this new tech was, I hit play, sat back on the couch, and my wife and I proceeded to watch with growing, wincing puzzlement what can best be described as a flipbook version of Jason Bourne kicking Russian ass. His fluid mixed-martial arts were reduced to a strobelight Vogueing dance. Between the choppy video and the fast-paced action and editing, it was simply unwatchable.
Yeah, that’s not right. Just a sec, hon!
I looked for settings to fiddle with—anything—but because the movie is housed in iTunes, there aren’t any. I checked my connections, made sure my laptop was plugged into the wall and running on full processor performance. Still nothing-doing. Somehow, iTunes is such an unbelievably greedy processor hog that my G4’s 800mhz processor just can’t handle playback . Which is insanity—talk about bloatware. But, like Bourne, I wasn’t going to be slowed by a hiccup like this. On to Plan B.
Feeling a little MacGuyver-like, I decided I would pop the movie on my year-old video iPod then plug that into my TV. Since it was synced with my desktop Mac I reassigned it to my laptop, set it up for movie syncing and nodded to the wife,“Five minutes babe—just gotta transfer the file. No worries.”
Only nothing happened. Checked my cables, checked my settings. Wiped the beads of sweat from my brow and forced a smile to my patient wife on the couch. Went online to Apple’s support message boards: Clickety-clack, come on guys, what’s going on here… and a little helpful info later, found out movie rentals only work with iPods from 2008. Yes, my-less-than-a-year-old iPod is too old and stupid to run movie rentals, it seems. Dandy.
Okay, onto Plan C: transfer the rental to my other computer and watch it on my big LCD screen.
I dig around for an Ethernet cable and a firewire cable, and decide to head online to see which route was best. A good 20 minutes of reading discussion boards revealed that this actually isn’t an option. While you can transfer purchased movies, you can’t transfer rentals between two computers. Though you can transfer one to an iPod or iPhone. Okay, tough-guy, so it’s Plan D then: my iPhone. I’d have to blank it and sync it with my laptop, but that’s okay, I’ll just resync with my desktop later.
Now, I have no other tricks up my sleeve, short of cloning my drive to a partition on my desktop’s hard drive, which would take a couple hours and I’m pretty sure would leave me single. This is my Alamo. I plug my trusty iPhone in to my laptop… aaaaand… my laptop isn’t running the newest OS and so can’t handle an iPhone. Oh, it is a crushing thing for a man to be humbled by his toys. All the more so when his wife is snickering.
By now the movie has already downloaded, so I try restarting iTunes. It kind of works, so I drag my 21-inch LCD (Plan E, if you’re counting) into the living room, hook it up to my laptop via DVI and watch as the already slow video degrades to a slideshow. There’s Bourne standing. Now he’s across the room. Who is that guy? Never mind he’s on the floor. Aaaand Scene! Unbelievable. So the wife and I proceed to huddle around my laptop, stopping every 15 minutes or so to quit out of iTunes and restart it to make the movie vaguely watchable. We could only take it for so long, so we quit in frustration and called it a night. So much for video-on-demand, iTunes-style.
For the record, the next day I rented another movie on my desktop system, and minus the odd stutter it worked flawlessly. However it required sitting in my deskchair to watch a movie, which isn’t what consumers are going for. It turns out also that even if I did have an Apple TV, I couldn’t transfer a rented movie to my iPod or iPhone or laptop or desktop. And once you start watching, you have just 24 hours to watch, anyway. How is this better than my cable company’s VOD service? What demand gap is this satisfying?
So, I respectfully apologize to Mr. Cuban, and submit that he is right. Video over IP will indeed one day compete with our cable TV. But despite what you’ve heard, it isn’t happening today.
17 Comments
To comment, please Login.
|
|
|
|
|
|
June 2013: American Energy Independence
Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more.
Popular on Popsci
Most Commented
Entertainment & Gaming
Most Emailed
Entertainment & Gaming
Most Viewed
Entertainment & Gaming
Online Content Director: Suzanne LaBarre | Email
Senior Editor: Paul Adams | Email
Associate Editor: Dan Nosowitz | Email
Assistant Editor: Colin Lecher | Email
Assistant Editor: Rose Pastore | Email
Contributing Writers:
Rebecca Boyle | Email
Kelsey D. Atherton | Email
Francie Diep | Email
Shaunacy Ferro | Email
Today on PopSci.com
Copyright © 2012 Popular Science
A Bonnier Corporation Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
why does everyone bow to Apple these days? This is the kind of crap they always pull: a one-year old device that doesn't do this, can't do that, buy a new one don't change the battery blah blah blah...Unless you plan on watching movies on your laptop or desktop for now, don't even bother. Although I do have Netflix, and their movies stream very nicely, never have had a single glitch.
i'm not an apple user, but i did try recently working on a clients apple laptop to try and burn a few video clips from his camera (captured with iMovie) onto a cd (because there we're only a few videos)
first off, i found out that apple laptops don't like showing you the .mov/.avi/.mpg/.whatever unless you open iMovie or iDVD.. so we can't even see what file format the video is..
i guess (according to my client) .mp3s don't exist outside of iTunes either...
apples also can't burn 'data cds'... so we ended up wasting a whole 4.7gb DVD on about 250mb of video...
so buyers of the new macbook air: 'congratulations' you've just paid too much for the newest, prettiest peice of incapable hardware... ^_^
Hey,
Love the site. Grouse, thanks for the article. Sorry to hear about the trouble you had watching a downloaded film. A suggestion, just in case you haven't tried it already -- try running the Disk Utility to fix permissions. We live overseas and have been feeding our US TV fix via the iTunes store for some time now.
We also use iTunes to manage ripped versions of all our kids' DVDs (the originals go into sleeves to prevent scratching). Playback has mostly been flawless. Recently, though, I hooked up our travel drive to my semi-retired Powerbook G4 while Stateside and got the same choppy playback problem.
Fixing disk permissions fixed it immediately. Just one of the few quirks of a unix-based operating system.
As for the second post about Apple's not showing file types or burning data discs, I'm afraid that's an assessment that might have been better made after spending a little more time with the machine.
I'm looking at a ".mov" movie file sitting on my desktop right now, next to this browser window. Along with two ".zip" files and a folder full of ".mp3s."
OS X allows you to choose to show or hide file extensions as you wish, either for each file individually or for the whole system. Here's a fine explanation of how to do it....
*http://www.fileinfo.net/help/mac-show-extensions.html
Though, like most things on the Mac, it's pretty easy. Just go under the Finder preferences and in the 'Advanced Menu' click or unclick "Show all file extensions."
The note about Macs not burning data discs baffles me. Of course they burn data discs, and have done so for years. I have a folder full of data-only DVDs in my closet right now -- backups of years of documents and programs, movie files included.
Again, here's a pretty simple tutorial (four one line steps)...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=42663
But it's awfully easy. From iMovie, you also have the choice to burn your movie as a "project archive" (saves all the files an effects, but not as a single layer movie playable in a video player)... or to burn it as a video to play in a DVD machine, which it sounds like you did.
I don't want to come across as a rabid fanboy, though admittedly I'm a longtime fan of Apple products. And really, I do appreciate the article.
But just so you know... most times you have any issue with an Apple, you can just type it as a question or short sentence in Google with "OS X" afterward and you'll come up with a quick solution.
Best of luck. Hope you change your mind!
Last weekend, I bought my very first Apple product. It was a 160GB Apple TV. I plugged it in, and it worked.
I can rent or buy a movie or tv show from my couch. It's easy. I rented Hidalgo, it played perfectly. I can pause it, rewind it, fast forward it.
After we watched the movie, my wife got ahold of the remote. I kept hearing her exclaim, "This is great!".
She was watching various podcasts for free. National Geographic has one entitled "Otter Babies."
Apple TV and Itunes have merged the TV to the internet. It's simple, its not expensive, it easy, and its fun. There is no going back.
The advantage of Apple TV rentals, is that you don't have to fit anybodies schedule. You decide when to rent, you decide when to watch (you have 30 days to start watching, 24 hours once you first watch it.). You can pause, rewind, fast forward. It's just like going to the video store except you never have to leave your couch and you never have to return a video. No late fees are possible.
Jon, the fact that you couldn't get a specific movie to work after going "full geek" on your older gear is pretty irrelevant. Think about it: you spent hours trying to get an older G4 laptop to drive your TV with all kinds of geeky tweaks. Wouldn't you have been better off just picking up an Apple TV box (at $229 they are cheap) and *plugging it in* to your TV? What is your time worth?
More to the point, saying that Internet TV is *years* away because you had trouble with your old laptop just doesn't make sense. I buy or rent Movies on iTunes fairly often and it really couldn't be easier. Sorry, Jon, you're wrong: Internet TV is today.
"first off, i found out that apple laptops don't like showing you the .mov/.avi/.mpg/.whatever unless you open iMovie or iDVD"
False. Look at the icon or use "Get Info" (that's the Mac's "Properties").
"i guess (according to my client) .mp3s don't exist outside of iTunes either..."
Also false.
"apples also can't burn 'data cds'..."
Entirely false.
"so buyers of the new macbook air: 'congratulations' you've just paid too much for the newest, prettiest peice of incapable hardware..."
You say you're "not an apple user." Hardly necessary to point that out...
Not sure what you are trying to achieve with a 800 MHz PPC, but you do realise you are trying to play 480p AVC here. You are trying to cut the Canadian wheat fields with a hand scythe.
I bought an apple tv for my niece this Christmas, her father is really anti-apple and refused to help her set it up with her PC, needless to say 15 minutes and she had itunes and the apple tv working just fine. I wondered if you wanted my 6 year olds email address so she can help you out (come to think of it she was only 5 at Christmas).
Disoneflipguy.... Not sure where you are coming from you can burn data CD's from a mac and you can also view a movie without actually opening any applications (let alone only imovie/DVD), try that on your PC.
Quote: "It was in the third hour of a bewildering odyssey into the iTunes rental wilderness..."
Umm, you used a six-year-old Mac- who'd have guessed that might be trouble? A lot of this can be traced to DRM, but the good news is that with modern hardware, you can take your movies with you. Try that with Unbox, Hulu, or Netflix.
I'm using iTunes movies with my Mac & iPhone, and really loving it. The only problem is that the movie selection isn't great at this point.
Houston, while you're ad for apple is entertaining, I'm curious as to how that is all different from digital cable. Of course for all I know you could be plat for apple or somethinng, but I am curious as to how what you did with your apple tv and Hidalgo is so vastly superior to what I did with my samsung and digital cable and Shoot Em Up.
You may or not find this interesting but My wife and I rent movies onour xbox all the time and get none of that stuttering. I also rent stuff through amazon and have none of these issue. Video on demand is ready for primetime...maybe ITunes rental is not..but I think it is. Your gear was just old for the service.
I don't have cable TV, I never have, and I most likely never will. To me, cable is all about the 57 channels and nothing on. I realize this is a bit different than the average person.
When the internet came out, I totally abandoned TV. I only watch a few shows here and there. I like Jericho and Sarah Conner and that's about it for new TV shows. The fact that I like those shows means that they will probably be canceled soon. I like the internet because I can explore and learn as I wish when I wish. Everything is at my behest. When I heard about pay per view, I was mildly interested in cable. I always wanted to be able to rent movies through the "telephone line". Then I found out that pay per view was not an individual service, it was still broadcast at the time and place of somebody else's choosing. I have no knowledge of the digital video service you are talking about, but it does sound like it can do some of what the Apple can do.
About a month or two ago, I learned that Netgear and Apple had these digital media devices which were designed to allow you to rent movies. (The netgear can also function as a DVR, but I haven't tried it and I think those who have are frustrated with glitches.) Despite the fact that I don't watch TV much anymore, that is mostly due to the current dirth of content, I do enjoy movies and certain TV shows. I bought a Netgear EVA8000. I won't comment on it much because it was a product that I would say isn't quite ready for prime time consumption. Part of this was because I knew nothing about networking or video files or anything else. I have since learned a lot, and I think Netgear will improve the product. I couldn't rent a movie and use the Netgear to deliver it to my TV without the sound dropping out. I experienced the exact same frustration as the author of the article did because me and the wife had to huddle at the computer to hear the Tan Hauser gate monologue of Rutger Hauer in the final cut of Blade Runner.
So why do I like the Apple TV? I bought it because the Netgear gave me trouble. I plugged the Apple in and it worked. I was shocked. I could rent movies (or buy), I could buy TV shows, I could do what I want, as I wanted from my couch. I could do it instantly and it worked beautifully.
But wait, there's more. (I don't work for Ronco either.) I can sync all my photos and all my flip videos to the Apple TV. It will present my photos with or without music I have synced to the Apple TV. It will present them in a slide show and it can use my photos as a screen saver in a wonderful streaming parade. I can change the folder of photos it uses for the screen saver. I can sync my music to the Apple TV. I can watch You Tube videos on the Apple TV, I can find them and select them and watch them from the couch. I can view video podcasts from AppleTV. This can be much more entertaining than I would have initially thought. I can enjoy content I pay for and content I get for free.
I only need a high speed internet connection that I will always have anyway and I don't have to pay for Cable TV. I hear that some people pay quite a bit for Cable TV these days. I'd rather pay for what I want to watch instead of letting somebody else take my money and send me what they want to for it.
I have never owned an Apple product before, much less been in their employ. In fact, I made a post this morning on the Apple support forum pointing out this article and Apple took it down. They said the forum was specifically to help people solve problems and learn how to use the product. I didn't have any problems, but I am 42, and I really had no experience with iTunes and its library and syncing concepts. I am used to file sharing via Windows, so I had to learn the Apple way of doing things. It didn't take long.
I love this thing. I want people to buy it and I want this idea to grow. I want media freedom. Get on your computer and go watch Otter Babies on the National Geographic web site. Now imagine watching it on your TV. Imagine the power of the internet coupled with the convenience and performance of the TV. That's what Apple TV is about.
The only bad thing I have to say about the Apple TV is that it gets pretty warm. I have often wondered if I could take advantage of the excess heat to keep a pot of coffee warm. I'm a mechanical engineer and I hate loosing heat to random entropy when so much ordered work could be done with it. The fonts are kind of small too, but I think this is only an issue because I am using it on a standard definition 4:3 TV. The Apple TV was designed for 16:9 HD TV's and does not advertise that it will work on standard def, 4:3's. I will be getting a high definition Panasonic plasma, 50" in April when the new models come out without the analog tuners and with improvements to the contrast ratio.
My comment above is for Johnny Boy. I typed that in the subject, but it didn't show.
I can honestly say that I was shocked when reading an article on this site that they are basing their decisions on the readiness of internet tv based off of the use of a machine as old as it is. I know apple machines hold up pretty well, but I mean, a G4? come on. you could have at least tried a commodore 64 or an activision.
This is honestly one of the worst articles i have read. Were you as shocked as you were when you tried plugging your 93 accord's cigarette lighter into an electrical outlet and the car didn't charge that well?
I could only guess that people using/wanting to use internet tv aren't out their trolling some old school BBS's for the newest episode of Gilligan's Island or Hogan's Hero. I would guess most are using computers a little more up to date and are a tad more computer savvy , or breaking out their (approx) 6 year old machine to try a fairly brand new tech.
and for disoneflipguy... nevermind, not worth it. stick to your pc's. they need you know more than ever..
All I can say is… duh? You were trying to playback high-rez (not quite actually HD) video on an antique computer! I'm personally shocked that someone who claims to be tech-savvy would even imagine a happy ending to that scenario. I can only assume you were dramatically underestimating the video quality of the rented videos. Try this again on a computer that can actually handle the video, and you'll have a much more pleasant experience!
All right. I won't rent any movies. But there are some cool ones on there. But in theory I could just put the movie on my iPod and then be able to watch it right now, that is if i got the connecting cord that you can hook up to the TV.
Just to respond to the usual handful of comments regarding my utter stupidity, etc.
Regarding being an idiot for using an old laptop to try new tech. I fully understand that upgrading equipment is a fact of life. However since the vast majority of computer users don't have a brand new PC, backwards compatibility should always be a concern for all manufacturers.
As for more specific moans, the rental wasn't HD, and wasn't the cause of the hiccup; and even if it were HD that shouldn't be a problem--I can easily watch and edit 1080p HD video on that laptop and playback is seamless. So it's not processor speed or video card speed or RAM or even bandwidth that seems to be the issue. It's the fact that iTunes is now apparently so bloated that playback of video requires a much faster processor (and again, I can watch other video using iTunes no problem).
My other frustration is the combination of forced obsolescence and DRM structures that made my first rental such a miserable experience. My 1-year-old iPod can't handle rentals, and thus would require an upgrade. My iPhone doesn't work with all but the last 2 OS X upgrades (a smaller point as OS upgrades are a fact of life; agreed). And while technically I could swap the rental to a NEW iPod, I'm unable to do so between computers, or the Apple TV and a computer for that matter.
In short, yes I know that if I went out and dropped a few grand on a new laptop, a new iPod and/or a new Apple TV, some of these issues are largely mitigated. I submit that there are plenty of other options out there that don't require that--Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, and cable VOD among them.
JC