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Apple and Fox Set to Announce Movie Rental Deal
mudimba writes "Apple and Twentieth Century Fox are about to announce a deal that will allow users to rent Fox movies over iTunes. The deal will allow people to download movies that will only play for a limited amount of time. 'Pali Research analyst Stacey Widlitz said the deal follows a trend of Hollywood studios selling directly to consumers and cutting out the middleman. "It's just a sign the studios feel ... that another distribution channel is where they are choosing to go, and incrementally it hurts Blockbuster and Netflix," Widlitz said.'"
You do know that your macbook pro has digital optical audio which will send dts surround don't you?
the Macbook pro had DVI out, but for audio, i have to use a USB to composite (red/white) cable. So even if the media is Dolby5.1, the laptop sends it to my stereo in.. 2channel stereo.
What are you talking about? Every Macbook/Macbook Pro has audio OPTICAL OUT. It'll do 6.1 DTS.
Don't blame the hardware if the problem is that you don't know how to use it.
I did some googling, and of all the ones you mention, it seems only XBox Live Video is HD (720p) and at a decent bitrate. The others are SD in 700-1.5Mbit, which simply is not good enough. (Amazon is 2500kbps average, but still SD)
At least the XBox service is evidence the studios are not totally opposed to HD at a decent bitrate, there may be hope yet.
Now all we need is a good box to play them on - I don't want a noisy '360 that I would not use for games anyway. A proper HD Apple TV 2 would be good - so long as it plays a few more file formats too.
Just a point on the Amazon service. I've used it with my Tivo, and the prices are really good. Actually, I just opened another tab to check the current prices, and ended up renting Transformers for $0.99 and Waitress for $1.99. Most of the rental* prices are around that. The really nice thing about Amazon's downloads is that it's just the movie. While this means no special features, it means no previews and no annoying menus getting between you and the movie.
*And yes, I said rental. Semantic arguments are teh lame.
The movies already available on iTunes are in the 1-2GB range, similar to DVD quality (slightly lower res than progressive DVDs, but a more efficient video codec (H.264 vs MPEG-2)), and will play immediately after the download starts. So as long as your bandwidth is faster than the bitrate of the video file (limited to 1.5Mb/s for the iPod, which is only a fraction of the bandwidth of cable internet), you can start watching the movie immediately.
As for getting it to the TV, that's what the Apple TV is for. Unfortunately, the Apple TV currently doesn't support streaming movies directly from the iTunes store. This seems exactly like the sort of thing Apple would update for a rental service like this.
Lets extend that: christianity != morality
It cuts out a lot of people.
No pressing discs. No printing boxes. No shopping finished product to distributors.
There's still a retailer involved, but a bunch of other middle-men are removed.
The limitation you are experiencing is because you are using the Quicktime player, instead of iTunes (or Front Row, if you have a Mac). Yeah, it's dumb, but you really wouldn't use Quicktime (player) to send it to your TV when you have the option to do it from iTunes (especially if you bought/rent it directly in iTunes). It's especially irrelevant if you use OSX and Front Row....or an Apple TV for that matter.