Dyvim
02-21-2008, 05:33 PM
Last week I tested out movie rentals via iTunes for my iPhone. In my opinion, this is a major value add to the device (and to all of the latest generation video-capable iPods and Apple TV). For those who are unaware, here's the scoop: For $3.99 (or $2.99 for older films) you can rent a movie. You have 30 days to begin watching the film, but once you press play you have 24 hours to finish watching the film. The terms and limits are similar to those for Video on Demand from my cable TV provider. The big advantage for me though is being able to transfer the video to my iPhone and watch it on a plane.
I know I can rip DVD's (although not technically legal in the U.S. to do so) into H.264 or MPEG4 format to watch on my iPhone, but honestly it takes a while to first strip the copy protection and copy the raw .VOB files to my PC and then set up the encoding parameters and then it takes all night to do the encode (I'm a 2-pass quality freak and my computer is almost 3 years old). And then some times it crashes mid-encode or the audio and video are out of sync or who knows what. Anyway, considering that most movies I only want to watch once, it's well worth $3 or $4 to me just in terms of my free time to rent a movie from iTunes instead of trying to convert a DVD.
The process:
You have to rent the movie from your desktop PC via iTunes. Once you rent the movie it takes around 45 minutes to download completely depending on the movie size and your connection speed. Unfortunately, you have to wait for the entire movie to download before you can do anything with it (unlike Apple TV where you can start watching as soon as it does a little buffering). Then you need to transfer it to your iPod\iPhone. On my iPhone this takes another 8-10 minutes or so due to the slow write speed of its flash memory. You can also watch it on your PC in iTunes. You can even do half and half- watch the first half on your PC and then transfer it to your iPod or vice versa. The caveat is that the movie exists on only 1 device at a time, so you will need to copy it back to your PC (another several minute wait) in order to finish watching it there, and of course all viewing must be within the 24 hour window from starting playback.
The terms:
You can keep the movie without watching for up to 30 days. Once you start playback you have 24 hours to complete. For me the 30 days is a nice feature for iPod play even though I would never need it for VOD from my cable TV. Here's why: when watching a VOD movie on my TV I always want to watch it immediately and the movie starts almost instantly so there's no point in pre-ordering. But on my iPod I need to plan in advance to stock my device with video before traveling. And my plans may change. I actually rented my first movie back in January when I was on another trip, but it turned out that I didn't have the opportunity to view it during my flight. No problem - I finally watched it nearly a month later when I made another trip last week. So I like having the flexibility of choosing when to watch the video on my device. On the downside, I really wish they would offer either 48 or 72 hours to watch the movie because some times you just can't finish a movie within a 24 hour window.
The quality:
All films are encoded at a maximum resolution of 640x480. Movies that are not new to the iTunes store seem to be encoded non-anamorphically, which means that most likely they are encoded at 640x360 (16:9) or 640x272 (2.35:1), which is definitely sub-DVD quality, but on a 480x320 screen there is no issue and I think they look great. Video bitrate hovers around 1500kbps and audio bit rate is 128kbps. Both are more than adequate for a mobile device IMO. I spent years encoding DVDs to 900-1000 kbps in DivX as that was the highest bitrate that could be played back on my Pocket PC without dropping frames. The iPhone plays back 1500 kbps H.264 without a hitch and the colors look great on the 18-bit color screen. Films that are new to the iTunes store (apparently all rental-only films) seemed to be encoded anamorphically at 640x480. So 16:9 films playback at 854x480 (using the full 480 pixels of vertical resolution), while 2.35:1 films playback around 854x360 (still not using the full 480 pixels of vertical resolution, but better than using only 272). I think this will have no effect on the quality on the iPhone but will improve the quality when viewing on your PC or Apple TV. This could be better described as "near-DVD" quality since it is anamorphic 640x480 compared to anamorphic 720x480 of NTSC DVD (80 pixels less horizontal resolution; i.e. horizontally 80 fewer pixels of information are stretched to fill the same 854 pixels) but still much lower than PAL DVDs (720x576). Anamorphic encoding is not used on 4:3 content.
The selection:
Pretty paltry so far. Apple has signed all the major movie studios to support movie rentals, which is much better than its previous movie sales model (which few studios supported), so selection should ramp up over time. I'll be interested to see what the selection looks like by the end of summer. But I have had little time in the past 2 years to either go to the cinema or watch DVDs, so even their paltry selection should hold me while traveling for a while. (It seems like only while traveling do I have time to watch a movie these days.)
The experience:
Mostly good. I watched 2 films on my flights out: "Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer" and "Transformers". I did top up my battery in between flights using an AC adapter and an open airport outlet, but I still had over half my battery power upon arriving at my destination (and I did a couple hours of book reading using offline Readdle files and some music playback as well). I also watched 2 films during my stay- choosing to watch videos while lying in my hotel bed instead of watching what was available on the hotel TV or venturing out to a cinema. I was only able to rent these extra films because I had my latop with me. If I only had my iPhone, I would have been out of luck. My one glitch came when the 3rd movie I'd rented failed to self-delete itself after the 24 hours expired. It was unavailable to watch, but still occupying 1.6 GB of my precious flash memory space. Numerous restarts and re-syncs with iTunes could not fix it. Finally I realized that if I set iTunes to manually manage movies and music on my iPhone that I could then manually delete the expired movie file while the device was connected to iTunes. This is a glitch that Apple needs to fix. I rented 2 more movies for the trip back: "Next" and "Way of the Gun". I only watched "Next". Actually I was unable to finish it and missed the last 30 minutes because it expired. Darn- this is where a longer viewing window would have come in handy. But I still have almost a month to find the time to watch "Way of the Gun".
Overall verdict:
I'm quite pleased with the new option to rent movies on my iPhone. The convenience factor and good (for mobile device viewing anyway) video quality make it worth $3 or $4 to me. I will continue to rent movies but probably only for use while traveling and not on a day-to-day basis. I'm considering whether I should invest in a set of AV cables so that I could try playback on a hotel room TV- might be a nice way to finish a movie I start on the plane. That's when I'd notice the difference between anamorphic and non-anamorphic encoding. I wish I could rent movies directly to my phone using WiFi without having to involve my laptop. And I wish I could get more than 24 hours to finish a movie.
I know I can rip DVD's (although not technically legal in the U.S. to do so) into H.264 or MPEG4 format to watch on my iPhone, but honestly it takes a while to first strip the copy protection and copy the raw .VOB files to my PC and then set up the encoding parameters and then it takes all night to do the encode (I'm a 2-pass quality freak and my computer is almost 3 years old). And then some times it crashes mid-encode or the audio and video are out of sync or who knows what. Anyway, considering that most movies I only want to watch once, it's well worth $3 or $4 to me just in terms of my free time to rent a movie from iTunes instead of trying to convert a DVD.
The process:
You have to rent the movie from your desktop PC via iTunes. Once you rent the movie it takes around 45 minutes to download completely depending on the movie size and your connection speed. Unfortunately, you have to wait for the entire movie to download before you can do anything with it (unlike Apple TV where you can start watching as soon as it does a little buffering). Then you need to transfer it to your iPod\iPhone. On my iPhone this takes another 8-10 minutes or so due to the slow write speed of its flash memory. You can also watch it on your PC in iTunes. You can even do half and half- watch the first half on your PC and then transfer it to your iPod or vice versa. The caveat is that the movie exists on only 1 device at a time, so you will need to copy it back to your PC (another several minute wait) in order to finish watching it there, and of course all viewing must be within the 24 hour window from starting playback.
The terms:
You can keep the movie without watching for up to 30 days. Once you start playback you have 24 hours to complete. For me the 30 days is a nice feature for iPod play even though I would never need it for VOD from my cable TV. Here's why: when watching a VOD movie on my TV I always want to watch it immediately and the movie starts almost instantly so there's no point in pre-ordering. But on my iPod I need to plan in advance to stock my device with video before traveling. And my plans may change. I actually rented my first movie back in January when I was on another trip, but it turned out that I didn't have the opportunity to view it during my flight. No problem - I finally watched it nearly a month later when I made another trip last week. So I like having the flexibility of choosing when to watch the video on my device. On the downside, I really wish they would offer either 48 or 72 hours to watch the movie because some times you just can't finish a movie within a 24 hour window.
The quality:
All films are encoded at a maximum resolution of 640x480. Movies that are not new to the iTunes store seem to be encoded non-anamorphically, which means that most likely they are encoded at 640x360 (16:9) or 640x272 (2.35:1), which is definitely sub-DVD quality, but on a 480x320 screen there is no issue and I think they look great. Video bitrate hovers around 1500kbps and audio bit rate is 128kbps. Both are more than adequate for a mobile device IMO. I spent years encoding DVDs to 900-1000 kbps in DivX as that was the highest bitrate that could be played back on my Pocket PC without dropping frames. The iPhone plays back 1500 kbps H.264 without a hitch and the colors look great on the 18-bit color screen. Films that are new to the iTunes store (apparently all rental-only films) seemed to be encoded anamorphically at 640x480. So 16:9 films playback at 854x480 (using the full 480 pixels of vertical resolution), while 2.35:1 films playback around 854x360 (still not using the full 480 pixels of vertical resolution, but better than using only 272). I think this will have no effect on the quality on the iPhone but will improve the quality when viewing on your PC or Apple TV. This could be better described as "near-DVD" quality since it is anamorphic 640x480 compared to anamorphic 720x480 of NTSC DVD (80 pixels less horizontal resolution; i.e. horizontally 80 fewer pixels of information are stretched to fill the same 854 pixels) but still much lower than PAL DVDs (720x576). Anamorphic encoding is not used on 4:3 content.
The selection:
Pretty paltry so far. Apple has signed all the major movie studios to support movie rentals, which is much better than its previous movie sales model (which few studios supported), so selection should ramp up over time. I'll be interested to see what the selection looks like by the end of summer. But I have had little time in the past 2 years to either go to the cinema or watch DVDs, so even their paltry selection should hold me while traveling for a while. (It seems like only while traveling do I have time to watch a movie these days.)
The experience:
Mostly good. I watched 2 films on my flights out: "Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer" and "Transformers". I did top up my battery in between flights using an AC adapter and an open airport outlet, but I still had over half my battery power upon arriving at my destination (and I did a couple hours of book reading using offline Readdle files and some music playback as well). I also watched 2 films during my stay- choosing to watch videos while lying in my hotel bed instead of watching what was available on the hotel TV or venturing out to a cinema. I was only able to rent these extra films because I had my latop with me. If I only had my iPhone, I would have been out of luck. My one glitch came when the 3rd movie I'd rented failed to self-delete itself after the 24 hours expired. It was unavailable to watch, but still occupying 1.6 GB of my precious flash memory space. Numerous restarts and re-syncs with iTunes could not fix it. Finally I realized that if I set iTunes to manually manage movies and music on my iPhone that I could then manually delete the expired movie file while the device was connected to iTunes. This is a glitch that Apple needs to fix. I rented 2 more movies for the trip back: "Next" and "Way of the Gun". I only watched "Next". Actually I was unable to finish it and missed the last 30 minutes because it expired. Darn- this is where a longer viewing window would have come in handy. But I still have almost a month to find the time to watch "Way of the Gun".
Overall verdict:
I'm quite pleased with the new option to rent movies on my iPhone. The convenience factor and good (for mobile device viewing anyway) video quality make it worth $3 or $4 to me. I will continue to rent movies but probably only for use while traveling and not on a day-to-day basis. I'm considering whether I should invest in a set of AV cables so that I could try playback on a hotel room TV- might be a nice way to finish a movie I start on the plane. That's when I'd notice the difference between anamorphic and non-anamorphic encoding. I wish I could rent movies directly to my phone using WiFi without having to involve my laptop. And I wish I could get more than 24 hours to finish a movie.