apple tv not preloading rented movies to watch later

Yes, it was a support page. However I checked the tech specs page and it also mentions the requirements at the bottom.

Try accessing

http://www.apple.com/appletv/specs.html

That is odd that it isn't shown on yours.

Also, I checked iTunes and it does give me the option to rent either SD or HD. It's not on all titles though, i'm sure that has something to do with licensing.

It's a tough one really, I've seen the suggested connection speeds numerous times but then I spend more than average time looking at these sorts of things.

There are plenty of occurrences of people buying sofas without being aware of the size of their lounge doorways but when it occurs I doubt many of us would say anything other than it's one of those things the user should be responsible for checking out prior to purchase.

It goes without saying though that the Apple TV audience can't be expected to be as savvy with the principle of Mbps as furniture customers are at understanding doorway measurements.

My Mom has an Apple TV 1, she doesn't have Internet but does have loads of family video, photos and her favourite music, she's a very senior citizen and doesn't have any issues understanding or using the Apple TV. I sometimes wonder if some of the logic behind the Apple TV 2 might just be a little too much to expect her to grasp easily.

Yes, I have HD Rentals on iTunes

UK Store? Which film?

I've never seen them, honest guv!

I don't believe it - I've just found some! New?

Never seen them before - can they be streamed to AppleTV?

So is there a catch?

If you download a rented movie on your computer: You can transfer it to a device such as your Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, or iPod if it’s a standard-definition film (movies in HD can only be watched on your computer, iPad, iPhone 4, iPod touch (4th generation), or Apple TV). Once you move the movie from your computer to a device, the movie will disappear from your computer's iTunes library. You can move the movie between devices as many times as you wish during the rental period, but the movie can only exist on one device at a time.

So does that mean I can or can't stream HD rental to AppleTV - if so then problem pretty much solved.

AC

vazandrew wrote:

Yes, it was a support page. However I checked the tech specs page and it also mentions the requirements at the bottom.

Try accessing

http://www.apple.com/appletv/specs.html

That is odd that it isn't shown on yours.

Also, I checked iTunes and it does give me the option to rent either SD or HD. It's not on all titles though, i'm sure that has something to do with licensing.

I do wonder if point 4 has been added and was never originally there, consequently some other countries sites may not have updated correctly - remember when some countries overview pages had TV Rentals listed when they weren't actually available.

The HD rental thing is odd.

I can't remember seeing them before - perhaps just looking at the wrong films!

The licensing is clearly bizarre with some items available in HD on iPad/AppleTV but not within iTunes itself.

Need to test that I can stream a HD rental to AppleTV now.

I'm pretty sure it was always on the US site, but then again I can't confirm that. It is odd that the other ones weren't updated (I do remember the issue with the TV rentals)

I agree that the licensing limits set in place are bizarre, that's Hollywood for you.

I rent directly but I know people who have rented HD via iTunes and streamed successfully to ATV.

Regarding the earlier point, yes the new version does put more onus on the consumer in terms of checking their network. It would be harder for older consumers, but if you don't have internet it would be hard to justify purchasing the new model anyway.

You don't need to know all the technical things but even just realizing that 6mbps is the minimum (for HD) is a start.

vazandrew wrote:

I rent directly but I know people who have rented HD via iTunes and streamed successfully to ATV.

Thanks for that - will have to give it a shot, maybe with cheap HD rental of the week.

I know I keep banging on about it but 6Mbps or so is only necessary for near instant streaming of HD.

Even then, from the download progress bar we can see that the movie does seem to fully download albeit temporarily, and we know that you can start watching when enough has 'cached'. So SD or HD, slow or fast connection the stream is temporarily cached.

The annoyance for me and others with slower connections is that with only a little more planning of the memory management, Apple could surely protect the downloaded stream in memory from being overwritten whilst other functionality continued using the remainder of memory - you would accept a 1 HD film limit and it might take some mins to several hours to start - if you didn't think that was ok switch to SD. If someone used other internet features the download could just pause to give the current activity priority, and streaming on a LAN should not require a large memory footprint as the stream would be available quite rapidly in general.

Just seems to me that with a little more thought it could work better on slow connections.

Better user experience overall would lead to more positive word of mouth promotion of this generally great product.

Regards

AC

I do hear your point. I guess I have come across people with slower connections who are still expecting instant streaming on HD

Have you tried restoring? I don't remember reading if you tried that. It could be a problematic unit. Try taking it in.