# iTunes Rentals Review



## RCuber (Jan 24, 2008)

Hello guys , Apple recently anounced the availability of movies via iTunes Rentals. This is a perfect legal way to watch movies on your computer with your family. $2.99 for regular movies and $3.99 for new releases, taxes are add after the purchase. 

I rented The Italian Job, had seen this one about 2 years ago so thought of refreshing my memory again . 

The movies are in m4v protected format. you cannot copy and watch the movie in another PC, it palys only on the system its been purchased. forget about cracking this one.

Once I rent a movie its added to my rented movies list and the download starts immediately , you can pause and resume the download later if you want, the file size was about 1.4GB. Once the complete file got downloaded, I had 30 days to start watching the movie. but if you start to play the movie then you will have 24 Hrs left to complete it. you can see the movie as many times as you want within that 24 Hr period. Once the time is up , the movie is removed from the rentals and the file deleted.

*The Quality.*

All rental movies are in Standard Def, too sad to see this,I also have a few Music Videos which I had downloaded from iTunes.. The Music Videos have much higher quality than the rental movies.  strange.. I was expecting it to be of the same quality. Compared to the 2 CD rips of Xvid/Divx and other format, its neck and neck .. m4v has a slight advantage.

Edges and Other artifacts and not visible in brighter scenes. but in a dark scene it changes.. I can see lots of digital noise in scenes which inlcude lot of dark/black spots. This is a common problem with most compression formats. 

I cannot say any more on the quality.. may be I will try another movie and check if there is any difference. 

*Closed Caption aka Subtitles.*
The most dissapointing thing which I saw was the closed caption. normally the subtitles are white text which overlaps on the video , where as the closed caption is the iTunes movies is horrible, a thick black background is added to the text which blocks the video behind the subtitles ,sometimes it even appears in the center of the video..  really bad .. 

*Playback speed..*
Well I have a P4 2.8GHz with HT with 768 MB ram + nVidia 7300GT gfx Card. I had a few applications running like the browser , a chat client, other few applications, with these running in the background , iTunes play back was bit choppy, check why this was happening and saw the CPU @85% ..  .. then closed all apps other than iTunes. now playback was smooth but it still took about 45-50% of the CPU .. This is a problem with iTunes and not the video .. Apple should consided using the available GFX hardware to render videos, using software rendering is a bad option.. atleast for guys with older CPU's.

Verdict.. 
Yes this is a good move by apple. just a tiny price to pay to avoid piracy. 
If Apple release iTunes in India with major bollywood hits in their library then this one will be a surehit .. 


*Screen Shots*

*files.myopera.com/GopiCharan/SS/SS2.JPG

Screen Shot 2
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PS: Yes we all know how to get free movies from internet, but thats not a point to be discussed here.


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## goobimama (Jan 24, 2008)

Thanks for the review. Much appreciated. 

M4v is plainly H264 in the M4v container with the DRM. 

Quality: H264 movies at 1.5GB are supposed to be very identical to the original DVD. Maybe it's just a bad encode? Cause Engadget was mentioning that the SD version of whatever looked mighty fine on the huge screen. But that might have just been the RDF 

Playback speed: I've noticed that iTunes is a resource hog in Windows (P4 3.0Ghz, 1GB RAM). It's plain and simple slow. Coverflow is far from smooth and videos always turn up choppy. Whereas iTunes even on the iBook 1.33Ghz is really smooth. 

Subtitles: While I always turn off subtitles, this seems to be horrible. I don't know the difference between the different types of subtitles, but this one certainly sucks.


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## preshit.net (Jan 24, 2008)

I too have noticed this one thing. iTunes on Windows painfully lags a lot of times even on my system with 2gigs of RAM on a C2D processor.
On the Mac however, even with my Mini having 1GB of RAM iTunes is great.

If Apple introduces a iTMS for India, and price the rentals something close to ~50, this is sure to catch pace.


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## goobimama (Jan 24, 2008)

Uh... dude? You sure that anything apple is going to be _cheaper_ in India?


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