Lissy and I decided to try out the new iTunes movie rental last night — a service I first mentioned a few days ago. Since the AppleTV upgrade will not be out for a few weeks, we rented Superbad in iTunes and planned to move it to AppleTV to watch. According to the Apple website this should be easy:
“Once the movie is downloaded, you can watch it on your computer or transfer the rental to a supported iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV“
Since I had already upgraded my iTunes to version 7.6 the rental option was available. I click to rent the movie, agree to the new Terms of Service, and start the download. The download ended up taking about 50 minutes over my Comcast cable connection. However, as advertised, I could start watching the movie in iTunes within a few seconds of starting the download. Great so far…
Once the movie finishes downloading, I go to transfer it to the AppleTV so Lissy and I can watch the movie together. Since I didn’t see a way to do this right away, I pulled up the instructions on Apple.com.
“1. Connect the device and select it in iTunes.”
Done. Easy enough.
“2. Click the Movies tab (for iPod), or the Videos tab (iPhone or Apple TV)”
Pulled it up. Great.
“3. Select the movie, and then click Move.
You must be connected to the Internet to transfer a rented movie.)”
Uh oh. The movie isn’t there. All I see are the holiday movies I transfered to my laptop for my son to watch on our flight to Orlando.
So, I do what any self-respecting gadget geek would do…
- Make sure that both iTunes and AppleTV have Internet access.
- Restart iTunes.
- Restart AppleTV.
- Set the laptop as the primary sync device for AppleTV.
- Try to create a playlist to sync.
- Try to create a Smart Playlist to sync.
- Tweak iTunes settings.
- Tweak AppleTV settings.
- Repeat steps 1-8 with minor variations several times.
- Admit defeat and go to Apple support.
- Can’t find any help there, get frustrated, give my wife the laptop to watch the movie, and go to bed early.
- Write this blog post the next day.
Has this happened to anyone else? Or, even better, has anyone else actually made this work? If so, please share your magic.
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10 responses so far ↓
1 Chris // Jan 20, 2008 at 5:56 pm
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1348044&tstart=0
Gotta wait a week.
2 Todd Sampson // Jan 20, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Just wish Apple had said something before I pissed away the money on the rental. The help docs say 100% that you can do what I am trying to do — without the need for the AppleTV upgrade.
- Todd
3 Josh // Jan 21, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Todd,
I feel your pain. My wife and I also rented Superbad just last night with the intent of watching it on the AppleTV. No luck. Bad job on Apple’s part. I’m going to see if I can get a refund now.
4 Todd Sampson // Jan 21, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Thanks Josh. Let me know how it goes.
- Todd
5 Ian // Jan 22, 2008 at 10:40 am
I live in South Africa and it took 6 good hours to download over our limited 1024 ADSL connection. Guess what? No movie on our Apple TV either! Google brought me here - thanks for the walkthrough - I was not feeling like fussing with this right now! Seems we’ll have to wait for next week. Please update us if there is any new developments.
6 Ian // Jan 22, 2008 at 11:06 am
Have a HP 8710W Notebook in the house with HDMI out - copied the movie to a 4GB USB drive - imported it into iTunes on the HP - it picked it up as a rented movie… Lovely! No go
now is the test of the DRM - dying to see if it expires on my PC. Both PC’s use the same iTunes account - blegh!
7 Wii Can’t Play DVDs // Jan 26, 2008 at 10:46 pm
[...] I just had my second tech+movie related issue in the last week. The Nintendo Wii can’t play [...]
8 Webdesign Den Haag // Feb 10, 2008 at 12:50 pm
eah pretty f*cked up. got the same problem here mate!
9 Brian // Feb 15, 2008 at 5:06 pm
I have the same problem. It does not work
10 saerdna // Feb 16, 2008 at 8:22 pm
First off, let me say, this made me laugh hard enough to read it aloud to my girlfriend who doesn’t care at all. Even she laughed. This is exactly the problem I have had and exactly the steps I used to troubleshot, and exactly that order, to which I found the same information. Too bad really, it is definitely a flaw that I am willing to bet they are not going to fix but instead change.
anyway, bravo on this blog, it was great. “any self respecting nerd would do”
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