Can't get space back from expired rental movie!

After playing around with the iPhone some more, I can see that what iTunes "knows" about the space formerly taken by the rental movie and what the disk capacity "thermometer" shows -- are two different things.

I was able to add a music playlist to the iPhone even though disk capacity showed insufficient space. But it's not like all the space is actually free. Apparently just part of it is free, because I still get an iPhone memory warning long before I would if all that space were actually free.

This is a very irritating bug- please help us out here, Apple...

"Go ahead and do a refresh of the phone (it's harmless as all of your stuff is backed up on your computer) and I'm sure things will be back to normal."

This is not a practical answer for me. My iPhone is full, and a restore takes a long time.

I've had this problem every time a movie expired on my iPhone. Eventually the space comes back, but it's a big problem in the meantime. Apple needs to fix this.

"Reset the iPhone by holding down both buttons until you see the Apple logo, and then reconnect it to iTunes and Sync."

I tried this several times. It had no effect.

Still having the same problem with every single rental movie that expires. The only way around this is to delete the movie from the iPhone before it expires, In my case, at least, if the movie expires while on the iPhone, the space is tied up -- at least for hours.

I've tried everything- all the suggestions that have appeared here, with no effect. Eventually, after a few hours pass, I'll get the space back after a sync. No rhyme or reason why.

When you're low on space like I am, it means there's no room for a new movie. It also means that I'm cutting down on movie rentals, because I have no space for them with expired, inaccessible movies clogging up my iPhone.

Apple's losing money on rentals here, as well as causing a lot of frustration.

{quote:title=Michael Seelye wrote:}I would think that a synch would correct the issue. The file needs to have a "timer" built into it, or iTunes will need to have the timer. What I'm getting at is what would make the file know "it's time is up?"{quote}

Both the iPhone and the host Mac have "timers" -- they know that time's up in the same way they knew to make the movie inaccessible. Sync does not correct the issue -- at least not until an additional number of hours have passed.

The fact that the movie is made inaccessible without giving back the space is a bug that needs to be fixed.

amenki wrote:
A full restore, initiated from within iTunes, and re-sync finally removed an expired movie that I had been stuck with for over a week.

That's what I ended up having to do- a full iPhone restore.

This time around, it was the oddest behavior I've seen yet. 15 hours after the rental movie expiration time, the entire GB+ disk space was still blocked out. If I clicked on the iTunes "Movie" entry, indented under the iPhone in the left sidebar, I could see the movie title, grayed out, even though nothing appeared under the iPhone "Movies" tab.

After another syncing attempt, the "Video" portion of the capacity "thermometer" display finally shrank back to normal, but the "Other" segment went from <200MB to well over a GB -- obviously the space was still blocked out, but just moved to a different storage category. Bizarre.

At this point, I finally threw in the towel and nuked the thing. A full restore returned my iPhone to normal. If I'd been on the road, this would not have been possible, because my iTunes library is on an external HD.

It's worth noting that my iPhone is plain vanilla 1.1.3. I've never jailbroken it, or done anything unorthodox. I never wanted to hassle with a non-standard configuration, and still I end up with this bizarre behavior.

I've already submitted a bug report. It doesn't seem that lots of people are complaining though- is it because they aren't renting, or they're deleting manually before expiration? Apple needs to fix this- I'm tired of futzing with it...