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How Does ATV save movie rentals

S

smp99

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 23, 2012
17
0
Having issues with renting on ATV. We have ATV3, but I suspect same thing for ATV2. Our internet is not fast enough to stream HD on the fly so I need to set it up and give it few hours. Fine, I can deal with that.

This weekend I have rented "The Help" and then "In Time". Waited overnight. Hit play to watch In Time, says it will be ready in few hours. So we switch to The Help, same thing, a few hours. It seems that The Help was 'ready' but got knocked out when I tried to load/play the other movie.

So I waited overnight again, and next day it gave notice that "in Time" was ready for viewing. Great, I know what to watch first. Waiting for other to arrive, I decided to watch a little Netflix. Guess what - In Time needs to re-download again - ready in a few hours.

Has anyone figured out how this works? I wish I could rent via iTunes on my PC, then playback on ATV, that way I have a local in-house copy it could stream from and not run out of storage space.

Suggestions?
 
L

LaWally

macrumors 6502a
Feb 24, 2012
530
1
First of all, you can rent movies via iTunes on your PC and watch them through ATV as long as you have Home Sharing set up. Since it is a rental however, it will be deleted from iTunes after the rental period has expired.

As to your other problem, you must have one slow Internet connection. 95% of the time my movie rentals are ready for viewing in less than a minute. There have been times however, when rentals have not been ready for viewing for a couple of hours because of a problem on Apple's side.

Maybe try recycling your router to see if that helps clear things up?

Just how slow is your internet connection?
 
S

smp99

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 23, 2012
17
0
Internet speed - usually I get anywhere from 1-3mb/sec

I would prefer to rent via iTunes then view on ATV. Home sharing is set up but I have read in a number of places that rentals cannot be viewed on alternate devices, specifically rent via iTunes on PC and view on ATV. I am aware this works for purchases but I thought not for rentals

I will rent a 99cent of something to test this out - if I can find something
 
whooleytoo

whooleytoo

macrumors 604
Aug 2, 2002
6,607
716
Cork, Ireland.
3Mbps is quite slow, in particular if watching any HD content. If you have less than the 5-6Mbps required for typical compressed 720p video, you'll have a long wait for buffering. Even on a typical SD movie, 1Mbps would require a lot of waiting.

If you rent on the ATV with that connection, you're better off not watching anything else until you start your movie; but LaWally's suggestion above sounds more workable. :)
 
L

LaWally

macrumors 6502a
Feb 24, 2012
530
1
smp99 said:
Internet speed - usually I get anywhere from 1-3mb/sec

I would prefer to rent via iTunes then view on ATV. Home sharing is set up but I have read in a number of places that rentals cannot be viewed on alternate devices, specifically rent via iTunes on PC and view on ATV. I am aware this works for purchases but I thought not for rentals

I will rent a 99cent of something to test this out - if I can find something
Click to expand...

With Home Sharing on, you can rent movies in iTunes and view them on ATV. I have done this many times. However, the opposite is not true. If you rent a movie via ATV, you can only watch the movie via ATV.
 
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