BitTorrent Video Download Store Falls Flat

seriously writes "We've all heard about BitTorrent going legit this week with legal movie and TV show downloads. Ars Technica took a look at the service to see how usable it was and ran into a few snags, including not being able to download or even open the video files on some computers. However, the ones that they did manage to open varied a lot in quality. Overall, they blame DRM: 'Without knowing whether browser compatibility and dysfunctional video files are a rare occurrence or not, it's hard to say whether BitTorrent's service is a good one overall. Our initial experiences have been disappointing and frustrating, and guess what the culprit is once again? DRM. Why the DRM failed to work on 50% of our purchases is not clear, but whatever the cause, it's simply unacceptable.'"

Comments

Tried it.. worked ok

[Panaflex]

I think I had the same problem - his Windows Media settings were wrong. In order to use the DRM you have to "Allow scripts" in the DRM settings. I bought and downloaded it on Linux, played it in Windows WMP10.

I would have been up in arms as well - but I noticed the yellow banner which told me to enable scripts.

The movie I tried (Broken Arrow) worked and the quality was fine. I consider it about the same as a movie ticket - but I do wish they'd allow more than 1 day to watch the movie after you start watching it(yes, I know you have 30 days to begin watching it - but I wanted to check to make sure it worked first). If I were buying the video I would have been much more annoyed with the DRM - but since it was a rental I wasn't too irked.

Download time was 1 hour (255 KBytes/second average download)