iTunes Movies in Canada: First Impressions
Posted on June 8, 2008
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Up late last night hacking away it occurred to me to give the new iTunes movies a go, now that the feature is available in Canada. My first impression: very, very nice indeed. The rental process was trivial, iTunes downloaded the film in the background exactly the same way it does when buying music, and it played back with nary an issue.
Video quality on a 22″ widescreen monitor was good but more importantly to me, the responsiveness of the iTunes controls was excellent. As a long time user of VLC, which is amazing software, my only gripe towards it is that for some video formats some controls such as fast-forward and rewind are sluggish, or too coarse, or occasionally non-operational. iTunes behaved exactly as one would expect, even scrubbing forward and back through the video seamlessly without hiccup.
I like that at 3:30am with 25 minutes to go in the movie I was able to simply put my machine to sleep, wake it up this morning and resume watching the remained without issue.
Unfortunately Rambo wasn’t available for rental yet so I tried it out on Hitman instead. Lest you be entertaining a similar notion, allow me to suggest you do not. Ever. Hitman is a celebration of cinematic mediocrity and ham-like acting.
(And I know what you’re thinking, but know that movies which require concentration and intellectual thought are not complimentary to writing code at the same time, especially late at night. A movie that requires little thought punctuated with explosions is in fact ideal for remaining awake and stimulated. Don’t judge me.)
I’ll definitely be using the iTunes movie rental again.
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I had the same experience. Super smooth, super easy, same price as a regular DVD rental - no complaints. I actually watched my rental on my 42″ lcd TV and it looked great. Thinking of picking up an AppleTV now. When I played with one in California a few months back I was really impressed and now that the same features are available in Canada I’m stoked!
I was thinking the same about the Apple TV but then I decided I’m not getting one until it supports cable-in (or digital-in) so it can record ala Tivo. That’s become my baseline minimum requirement for any TV-related device I’m going to spend on. I wonder if it ever will?