A shot in the dark...

The 5th Gen iPod may not support the 30-day/24-hour delete function. Newer models would.

Just a thought.

Interesting question about the file being deleted or not. When transfered, are there two copies, but one is unplayable? Also, what happens when you use Time Machine? Does it ignore rental files or is there a copy backed up that you can restore? Anybody play around with this yet?

Here's something to try. (I haven't gone all the way yet, since I'm not ready to pull the pin on the 24-hour grenade for my rental.) I noticed that if I copy the rental video file to my "Movies" folder, it shows up in Front Row. Don't know if it will play that way, or not. I'll be trying it out tomorrow night.

What really sucks is that movies I rent on my iMac aren't visible to any of the other Macs on my network through iTunes sharing. So for those of us who have a main Mac serving an iTunes library to laptops or Minis, the situation stinks.

But unless there is a hardware limitation, it's a "simple" matter of a firmware update.

good point

Hi,

I agree 100%. For me and my wife, with a baby of 6 months, is basically impossible to watch a movie in one take in 24 hours. We usually have to break the movie down in 2 or even 3 evenings. This is a very common problem for families with kids. I can't believe that Apple missed such an important aspect of the rental-crowd...

I hope that they will change it to at least 48 hours.

Andrea

My only major complaints about this Movie service is that I cannot access it from Front Row and what I can access with iTunes on my iMac, doesn't include the HD titles. On top of that I learned that the HD titles will only be available for Movie titles, not TV shows. I also seen complaints on iTunes that people are perturbed that they can't purchase first run movies before the DVD's been released, this to me is highly understandable and was mentioned in the keynote in how they would work, the rest wasn't. I believe the rest will ultimately go over as well as the $20 update to the iPod Touch did in the Keynote... (Noted how quiet the audience was, you could hear a frog fart from the pond outside, when Steve paused after mentioning that.)

The HD not available for all iTunes users is a deal breaker in my opinion though, seriously you've got a choice either pay at least ~$300 extra to get an Apple TV or do without. The Apple TV isn't even as powerful as the Mini, let alone the iMac and you can't even transfer the HD movies to them either. Although this may well be due to the fact that then people would notice how badly the picture quality of the 720p movies truly are. Still you should have the option of obtaining them through the Intel Mac's at least, or even make it a Leopard only feature on them for that matter. That could be yet another incentive to entice the other ~80% to upgrade to Leopard. Steve did say they had another 50 weeks left to go, so we could theoretically see a merging of the iTunes and Front Row apps in the future that does just that, called iStudio and allow for plug-ins for the front end to accept tuners and widgets.

After viewing the 720p HD version of the Keynote, full screen on my 24" iMac, and if that's any indication of how those HD movies are going to look, they can keep them. I do better than that when converting movies from DVD's, (let alone from the native 1080 DV cameras such as they were using to film that with,) then that keynote looked, and I'm by far from any kind of expert in it. Granted the experts in the movie houses will most likely be doing the encoding instead of some geek at Apple, but still to compromise the quality, which they will more than likely have to do so it can be streamed at T1 speeds, your not really going to be even getting the full quality 720p video and that's what's going to make it not even worth it.

Granted, I could conceive of paying $4-5 US for a movie that is currently playing at the theaters, to "rent it" if it's at theater quality but, not for just 24 hours, and especially if I can't watch it where and on what I want to watch it. ("Theater quality" means at a minimum 720p and 5.1 surround sound, and preferably with video quality at 1080i/p though.) Although, the 30 day limit seems reasonable, (unless your in a natural disaster that wipes out your home, in which case, you've got bigger problems to worry about than watching movies.) In fact they could probably cut the 30 day limit in half or even by a third to increase the watching time to at least 3 days, which is what the minimum is for DVD rentals. Granted the argument against it is that at the theaters you only have the time slot for which you purchased the ticket but, you also shouldn't have all the quirks with watching a movie at home such as the doorbell and/or telephone ringing mid movie either.

Maybe by the time they release the Apple TV, they will have a change of heart about their HD releases only on it and only for Movies but, it's doubtful at this point.

I agree, I'm partially deaf (45% of hearing loss), so for me is a must, everybody in my house demands to lower the volume of my TV, they are in their right because they don't want to be annoyed with the screams of an action flick. And susbtitles is a must too, I'm not a native english speaker (I'm colombian), although I speak and writes english, if the movie doesn' have CC the subtitles can help me anyway, not all actors are full front camera so I can read their lips!!!