Tim2797 wrote:
Our area is limited to 6mps download. Takes about 4hours to download movie from iTunes. Any suggestions to do it faster?
I'm on 4-5 Mbps, yes a hassle but there you go.
With a 6 Mbps connection (if it truly mainatins that) you should be able to play 720p HD nearly instantly - just adjust the iTunes playback settings in the AppleTV menus from 1080p to 720p - you may notice little difference.
Personally I want best iTunes quality if paying so am prepared to wait, but even with 1080p I can usually watch in 30-40 minutes.
One thing to remember with AppleTV 2 and 3 is that they do not have much memory - so if you rent a movie and then use the device for something else while waiting, when you go back to the rental the process may start from scratch.
If you are prepared to plan ahead a little, and have a computer running iTunes on the LAN with Home Sharing enabled swithced on, then use iTunes for the rental in advance - once the rental has fully downloaded (a couple of hours at 6 Mbps) it will be available to start watching for 30 days, and will appear on AppleTv under a new Computers>Rentals category - it must be fully downloaded but once it is playback should be near instantaneous unless your LAN is equally slow. Once you start watching you have the usual 24/48 hours to complete viewing depending on wher you live, but this can be very useful if you want to view th movie a second time within the viewing period as it does not need to download again (I've had 900MB SD rentals start downloading again from scratch once viewed when rented on AppleTV itself - annoying when someone else wanted to watch a few hours later).