Movie rentals disappear before watching them

I've had exactly the same problem.

Although Knight Hawk's solution initially worked iTunes crashed again for me and on reopening the movie had disappeared yet again.

Navigated back to the download folder, and renamed the rental movie file (should be a M4V file) from the generic 'Download' to the actual movie name. Then went back to iTunes->Files->Add file to library, then navigate to the appropriate file and added the movie. iTunes then recognised the movie, added a rental section to the library bar and showed the correct movie expiry time.

I have similar glitch with my (previous generation) AppleTV. Rented Knight and Day three weeks ago, have rented and viewed other movies in the meantime. Now it's the only moving in my "Rented movies" list and it displays "7 days remaining." But when I try to play it, it says my AppleTV is not authorized to play it. Unplugging and restarting the ATV and checking store in iTunes on my Mac made no difference.

However, to report a problem, start iTunes, choose menu "Store"->"View my account"

From there, click to view your purchase history and down the page just click the button to "Report a problem." Click the little arrow at the start of the line for the problem item, and from there you'll see what to do.

I wonder if iCloud has anything to do with this? I joined the beta a few months back.

Same problem here but they don't seem to have telephone support or they don't go further into detail about the problem. The email support is just I am sorry for the problem and they either give back a refund or put back the movie into the rental que. So we are stuck nowhere.

Same thing:

1. Rented 5 movies for a trip. Synced to iPad. Watched one of the movies. Next day, on another flight, started to watch another movie. 30 seconds in, I hit the end of the 24-hour rental period for the first movie. The iPad Video app crashes, and will not run after that. On arriving home, I find all movies have disappeared from iTunes as if they'd never been there (except for the charges on my credit card). I had to completely restore the iPad to get functionality back. iTunes refunds _some_ of the money I spent. Long flight, no movies.

2. I rent movies again, for a long flight. I watch the first one. At the end of the movie, the movie I just watched say "expires in 21 hours". Okay - but ALL of the movies now show 21 hours left, and none of them will play - just a black screen with the little spinning wheel. iTunes reloads all movies in the queue to try again.

3. I try to watch these same movies. Won't play on my iPad on yet anohter flight. Try to watch at home, and they won't play on iTunes (MBP), Apple TV or iPad - "not authorized".

Renting movies via iTunes used to be effortless. Loading them on iPad was easy. It all worked pretty well - up until a couple of months ago. Lion issue? Somebody really blew this one.

I'm pretty much done with iTunes and movie rentals until they get their act together. Really disappointing.

don't know what happened to itunes. same to me that it was effortless in the past. However, i reported the problem thru expressline online : https://expresslane.apple.com/GetproductgroupList.do and it was resolved within one day. my rental was restored and i can continue watching.

BTW I found that the issue only occurred when i watch it while downloading.

Sure. They give you back credit or put the movie back in the que but along with that, they are oblivious to the problem. They don't give technical support or talk about errors or go into detail. All they tell you is, "Sorry for the problem, you need internet and computer to download. lol blah blah blah. Seriously, one response I got was I need a computer to download and another one was I need internet. Lame responses

OK, this has happened to me twice now. Here's the scenario:

I have a long, international flight. I rent multiple movies so that I can have films to watch both to and from the destination.

• I browse for the movies on my Mac (OS X Lion, current release)
• I rent four movies on my Mac.
• I then transfer them, one at a time, to my iPhone--a 4S with 5.0.1. (I do this because in earlier releases, a movie would sometimes disappear if I tried to sync more than one movie at a time).
• After it's done, I see four movies listed on myiPhone in the Videos app.

About 2 days later, I look at iTunes and decide to load some audiobooks. I look at the Movies tab and it shows only one rental movie on the iPhone, the last movie transferred. The other three movies are nowhere: they do not show as on the Mac or on the Phone.

• I check the phone. Only the one movie is present.
• At no point did I start to play any of the movies. It appears that the first three rental movies transferred disappeared from the phone as if they expired 24 hours after the transfer.

And--just to make it fun--this is the second time the exact same scenario has played out. I had a long international flight at the end of September and on iOS 4 the same thing happened before that flight. All but the last movie transferred vanished from the phone after a day.

I like the movie rental option, but it's getting to where I don't trust that I can safely rent movies.

I have to agree that Apple Support has been pretty quick about refunding the money I spent - but they are inconsistent as well: one time, they re-enabled my rentals so that I could download them again as opposed to refunding the rental fee - but I'd already re-rented one of them, so ended up paying twice.

Also, when you're on a 10-hour flight and you find you have none of the movies you thought you had rented, knowing a refund is likely coming doesn't help all that much.

Apple has always had an "It just works" ambience. Even for movie rentals. That this has been going on for so long without resolution is really disappointing.

Same here - long international flight, made a point to download three movies and transfer them to iphone before leaving. Didnt watch them on flight, upon sync at the hotel all movies are destroyed from phone and also the computer. Go through hassle of contacting support, two days later "we re-added them!" ... well great, except that I downloaded them at home specifically to avoid multi GB downloads over the crappy unreliable hotel network...

Re-download, resync ... ended up not watching them on plane. Get home and apple tv won't let me stream them, "you are not authorized". Follow on screen instructions, "You are already authorized." Try to play them directly on the computer, black screen and the timeline does not tick forward regardless if I hit play or not. And ALL movies suddenly show 23 hours to watch with countdown timer started even though I only tried to watch one of them (which doesn't play anyway).

Its true it used to be effortless but nowadays, it's anything but.

THANK YOU!

Just rented Cars2 on iPhone 4s. After downloaded, it was nowhere to be found. Help???

You did check the Videos app on your iPhone didn't you...? Just covering the easy bases first...

I downloaded two films from iTunes last week. I've just finished watching one, and now have just under 24 hours before the rental expires. So far, so good. However, the other film, which I haven't started to watch, and which should still have about three weeks before the rental expires, now has just under 24 hours left before it expires. It's probably some glitch that Apple needs to fix, but I can't help feeling swindled, as this is a contractual breach of the conditions of rental.

On my mac the solution is: home folder > music > itunes > itunes music > downloads and there will be a folder with the name of the movie you rented. Not very intuitive that it is under "itunes music" but there you go. Double click the download file and it reappears in itunes as a rental.

I started having the same problem after the upgrade to iOS 5 on my iPad 2. After losing a bunch of rented movies, I went to iTunes support without a lot of luck. After getting to iOS engineers we finally figured out what the problem was with mine (this may not be your problem, but it's big enough that they've elevated it to the software engineers). It was wi-fi sync. For some reason, they haven't figured it out yet, but with wi-fi sync enabled, my movies would disappear. Once I went back to wired syncing, the problem is gone.

What's odd is that movies would disappear even if I weren't syncing. One minute there, one minute gone. So if you have wi-fi syncing enabled and are losing movies, try disabling it. If you're not using wi-fi sync, then it's a whole nuther problem than mine. The engineer I worked with is now reviewing the boards (apparently even though a lot of people seem to have this, or similar problem, it's not a lot in the scheme of things. As I said, it has been elevated to the software folks by Executive, so hopefully we'll see a fix soon.