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I decided to try downloading a film from the new iTunes store this morning. After a quick browse through the store I came upon The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a favorite book of mine and a great example of an adaptation done right. Hitchhiker came out last holiday season so it was available for the “old releases” price of $9.99. Perfect. I plunked down the money and the download started straight away.
The download was quick, about 45 minutes over my 6Mbps connection, but perhaps not as fast as originally advertised by Apple. That said, I was impressed by how easy and painless it was to watch the film as it was downloading. About 15 minutes into the download I started it up and it played in full resolution with no stuttering. As for the quality, “near-DVD” is a good description. It plays in widescreen (thankfully) and some compression is noticeable but it’s certainly not distracting. From what I’ve watched thus far, it looked great even in fullscreen mode on my 20.1″ Dell widescreen monitor. I imagine it would look just fine on a standard definition television as 640 x 480 is roughly the resolution of SDTV.
Films remember your playback position (just like a DVD player does) and even feature a chapter selection built right into the controls. The chapter names are displayed along with a screen capture of each chapter. This is quite handy for calling up certain scenes or specific moments in a film. The standard track skip will take you to the next chapter in a linear fasion.
I’ve got to say, thus far I’m very impressed with the service. The download was fast, inexpensive and of high quality. My 1.33Ghz Powerbook G4 seems to be handling playback just fine even while using Photoshop CS and writing this blog post. I could have spent $13.99 plus additional shipping charges and waited a week for this film by purchasing it through Amazon, but that seems so 90’s at this point. iTunes will allow you to play back the film on 5 computers and unlimited iPods, and come this Spring beam it wirelessly to your main television using Apple’s iTV. I’m starting to feel like physical media such as DVDs and CDs are more of a bother than they are worth. As hard disk and flash drive storage prices continue to plummet, and connectivity between consumer devices improves, why even bother having all those silver discs lying around? I would much rather call up the media I’m looking for over an advanced home network.
The future is coming, resistance is useless.
UPDATE: I’ve just realized that when you sync your iPod with your computer it will make note of how far along in the movie you are and start playing at that point if you access it on your ‘pod. Nice touch!
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“Futile”. Resistance is “Futile“.
Great post though, how big was the final file? I wonder if I’ll be able to play that over the network!
You missed the gag. The Vogons always say “Resistance is useless” in HHGTTG. They aren’t known for their way with words, you should hear their poetry.
File is a 1.22GB .m4v
Aww, turns out I’m a chumpslice. 1.2gigs over 45 minutes, I guess that’s pretty good. You actually started watching 15 mintues in though right? That’s pretty respectable. Make some popcorn, poor a soda. Now if only we could get previews just like a normal movie theatre. Bandwidth is bandwidth though, better to just get the movie started than wait for trailers to load.
Ooh, what about an option? “Load trailers first”?
I should mention that they only reason I started watching 15 minutes in is I was busy with other activities. You are supposed to be able to begin watching after the first minute has downloaded.
As for the trailers, that’s an interesting idea. Personally, I was happy that for $9.99 I didn’t have to watch any ads before the film. I’ve noticed that commercial DVDs are starting to make un-skippable trailers de rigueur. I could see the movie studios requiring that same type of cross-promotion from downloads. What you could do is browse around the iTunes store and watch the previews there. They load instantly and are of very high quality. That way you could watch previews for things like “Deathrace 2000″ instead of the latest romantic comedy crap that is normally slung at you. Customize your trailer experience!
That sounds pretty sweet. 45 minutes for a 1.22GB movie isn’t too bad at all. I have been meaning to try out the movie downloads on iTunes, but unfortunately my iTunes keeps crashing, so I can’t use it!
Um, why does itunes suck so bad!?!
Every couple of weeks they make me upgrade a bunch of shit on my ipod or my laptop and, sure enough, things stop working. Immediately. Now, my fucking computer won’t even recognize that songs are on my ipod and it refuses to allow me to update it.
They want to release new versions. Fine. Great. Just leave me the fuck out out it, and stop fucking with my ipod damnit!
Allow me to reiterate, in my frustration:
Fuck Apple!
It sounds like you aren’t the only one having problems. There were reports of bugs in the upgrade coming in from a lot of different spots around the web. It sucks that you are having problems, but you should be able to find a solution with some Google searches.
Have you tried this forum?
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=792
I imagine it will get fixed somehow, eventually. It’s just the constant upgrades, and the withholding of access to the music store unless you bend over and take the upgrade, that are really becoming frustrating.
My shit worked. I liked it. I understood how the program worked. Now that’s all out the window, and I have to waste time and energy trying to figure out how to make things work again. It seems like every “improvement” is exactly the opposite and makes my life more difficult.
I understand the times change and technology progresses, and that the occasionally upgrade is actually necessary. But it seems like I have to put up with this every other month with either itunes or my ipod, and Apple is really starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth.
[…] So I got interviewed by the Wall Street Journal last week about my experiences with Apple’s iTunes Store. Journal reporter Jessica Vascellaro found my recent post about the service while researching the story and decided to ask me for some additional comments. The story ran today and does a good job of surveying the movie download services currently available to customers. Unfortunately it looks like access to the article requires a subscription (when will old media learn?) but you can see a video interview with the reporter here. […]