Rented movie on iPad in iTunes app and is not downloading

Dowload error. Tap to retry (Rental Movie) - SOLUTION

The following solution worked for me on my 64g iPad using Wi-Fi:

1. Copied a random item from my iTune library (TV Shows) onto the iPad.

2. Next, deleted the above from the iPad.

3. Then, went back to the Download function on the iPad (had to re-enter user name and password).

4. Hit the blue arrow (next to the Download error) next to the movie rentals I was trying to download.

5. The two rentals that were causing problems immediately completed downloading.

6. Problem solved!

Hope this helps.

Regards

Rabski

As of May 7, 2011 this is still a very real problem. Movie rental download will error out (I had one get to very close to the end before it failed, but have tried several movies, many downloads and all failures) and then the iPad shows the space used up and there is nothing you can do to complete. "Tap to Retry" is just a further insult.

You have to Restore the iPad to get the space back, and at that point can try again. I have tried and restored many times with no luck. I have a high speed wireless network and have no problems with other downloads. I am using the latest IOS 4.3.2. I have downloaded movies in the past directly to my iPad with no problem, so I think it is a new problem in IOS. It is very disaapointing and frustrating.

Oh this came with a little bonus problem as well. After restoring my iPad, and trying to make extra room (that is what apple advice indicated) now iPhoto has a bizarre issue where the Events that you can download to the iPad have an individual occurrence for each time you entered pictures. This means I have 10 different Photos 1 events on my iPad. Apple come on, this is starting to smell like windows.

Thanks Rabski! I tried your advice and it worked. Since I had tried download, fail, restore about 15 times, I doubt this is just coincidence. It is still a huge problem on the Apple end, but this at least resolved it for me. My first download after moving over a tv show and then deleting it, worked fine. Art

SOLUTION

I did not have another movie or show to download to the phone. So, I download the free app iPhone Explorer (does not Jailbreak your phone) and deleted all of the files in the media/download folder. My phone then redownloaded the movie.

My friend said he uses the jailbreak app iFile when this happens and deletes all of the files in the media/download folder. This is how I knew what files to delete to get it to work.

Steve

Hi - I've been dealing with the Apple team directly. I found a workaround for this issue and sent it to the Apple Development team. Her'es my email reply to them, having dealt with most apple teams in Apple and getting no-where. Hope it helps all you guys that are experiencing the same problem...

Hi Team

As I have a software Company, I have isolated the issue and found a workaround. I see there are lots of other people that are experiencing the same issue (type "unable to download movie itunes ipad" into google) so hopefully this description of the Apple bug below helps your development team for other customers.

Basically if you have an existing device and you use the icloud to backup your apps and device configuration, then when you replace your device with a new one (in my case, the old one was broken), if it is an iPhone (as I had to do this only a few weeks ago for it as well) then when you set up the new iPhone you can choose to do a restore from the icloud and the restore will work perfectly fine.

However when you restore from the icloud to a new iPad, while everything appears to work perfectly fine, there is an issue in that you cannot actually complete the addition of new movies and music to your itunes account on the device. The download takes place and it is when it completes the download and it goes to install the content on the device, that the bug appears.

So the issue stems from doing the restore from the iCloud onto the ipad device. My workaround was to do another complete reset of the device and then manually install every app and movie that I have ever purchased. This was a hugely time-consuming process because I have tons of apps in the iCloud, however after spending most of the weekend and installing every one individually and then finally the movies again, they work perfectly fine. However if I'd restored from the iCloud (so it all restores automatically), I would have experienced the bug above.

So in short, there is a bug with restoring from the iCloud onto an iPad so that after the restore is complete, users are unable to successfully install movies and music. I see lots of other people complaining about the same thing online, with no visible solutions or workarounds.

Hopefully that will help you for future customers. By the way, because it was a fresh install, there were no space issues (I had 25 gigs free) and there were no networking issues as my iPhone working on the same wireless network was able to add music perfectly fine.

Hope that helps.

Kind regards,

Jason