Renting Movies On-Line: Amazon vs. iTunes

[Ro_Laren]

I live overseas and miss my English language movies! I want to rent movies on-line, but Netflix doesn’t work in my country. The only other options that I can think of are Amazon or iTunes. I’m curious to hear about your experiences renting movies from Amazon and / or iTunes. Which do you think is better? Will they download the movies at the same speed? Can you watch the movies as many times as you want within 48 hours of renting them? Do either of them have annoying lag times when watching the movies? Can you pause and rewind just like a regular DVD? Do they have subtitles? FYI, I already have iTunes on my computer, so I know that I don’t have to download any new software. But, if I use Amazon to rent a movie, do I have to download any software?

 

[Miss Chicken]

I only down TV shows from iTunes, i have never rented a movie. However I do know that one cannot download movies or TV shows from Amazon in Australia, so you better check if you can in your country - I think but I am not sure that it is might be limited to the USA though I believe you can get around this if you have an American IP address.

 

[Lindley]

There's a new one now, Google Play. I don't know if it's any good.

 

[Sean Aaron]

I have rented films from iTunes. You can either start watching right away in which case you have 48hrs. to view or just download and then you have a longer window (I think it's two weeks, but it could be a lot longer), but the 48-hr clock doesn't start until you press "play." The streaming was excellent, though I do have 16Mbps download via BT Infinity. My ex had no complaints and it was via DSL2 at less than 6Mbps. You can watch as many times as you like during the viewing window.

I have yet to see anything that supports subtitles or foreign language tracks; hence my anime and other foreign films will still be purchased on DVD. You use iTunes to view so you can click and drag the play position about, pause and so forth. If you pause for a long time it might take a couple seconds to get going so I usually move the start point back a bit if I do that.

I cannot comment on Amazon for film rental, however I wasn't impressed with their method of downloading digital audio purchases which involved installing some kind of client and a one-time only download. My first and only album purchase I had to raise a support call because I didn't realise that the bizarrely-titled file on my desktop was actually the album and I had to do something in the client to unpack it. When I went to recent purchases the file wasn't there to have another go. Not impressed at all.

 

[RJDiogenes]

^^ They may have fixed that. I had a similar problem a while back, but on my most recent attempt I was able to just download the MP3s straight to my computer, easy as pie.

 

[Ro_Laren]

I only down TV shows from iTunes, i have never rented a movie. However I do know that one cannot download movies or TV shows from Amazon in Australia, so you better check if you can in your country - I think but I am not sure that it is might be limited to the USA though I believe you can get around this if you have an American IP address.

That stinks! I haven't tested it out to see if it will work here...

 

[tomalak301]

I've rented movies on Itunes and it isn't too bad. Once you rent the movie you have 24 hours to complete it and then it will expire. If you haven't started the movie, than I think it's like 30 days. The quality is pretty good but I have to watch it on the laptop since I don't have anything to connect to the TV. Haven't tried Amazon's service.

 

[bluedana]

I've downloaded Amazon movies to my Kindle -- but you have to watch out because they'll randomly remove the file from your device once it expires -- even if their expiration date is wrong. And the most you can do is send them an email that says You Suck. I downloaded a bunch of kid movies for a long train ride, and ended up not being able to watch one of them because Amazon removed it two hours later (it was a 48 hour rental). I use Amazon only for instant streaming on my Kindle, which is great (and free, if you join Amazon Prime). Some films and shows do have subtitles; you can rewind and FF, and it does have a "resume" feature if you go back to the film. I find Amazon streaming comparable to Netflix for quality and quantity of selection.

I've downloaded movies from iTunes twice, and both times it took forever.

 

[Ro_Laren]

I ended up using iTunes to download the movie. And you're right bluedana, it took forever to download! There is an option to start watching the movie while you are still downloading the whole thing. I hit that option and it worked for a couple minutes until an error message came up and it stopped downloading the movie. This happened a couple times, so I decided to stop watching the movie until it was completly downloaded. When you play the movie, it popped up really big on the screen so that the movie was all you could see. That feature was nice. But, from time to time I had to pause the movie. And even though there was a play button on the screen, it wouldn't work when I wanted to resume the movie. So I had to go back to iTunes (i.e. leave the pop-up) and then double-click on the movie to make it resume playing. One time iTunes froze and so I had to cntrl-alt-del to close it. When I opened it back up, I had to log back in to make the movie come up. But it indicated that it wasn't completely downloaded (even though it really already had been completed downloaded), so I had to wait 30 minutes for it to download again.

Today, I watched part of the movie again with no problems. It didn't make me download the movie again in order to watch it (even though I had gotten out of iTunes the day before and had shut off my computer). iTunes told me how long it was going to be until the movie would disappear from my library. When it said that the movie had expired, I double-clicked on it just to see what would happen. At that point, the movie disappeared from my library.

My advice to people is that if you want to use iTunes to rent a movie is to start downloading it a couple hours before you want to start watching it. And, try to avoid pausing the movie!

 

[Sean Aaron]

I think it also depends on whether you're using iTunes for Windows or Mac. From talking to Windows users it seems the iTunes client on Windows doesn't work quite as nicely as it does in Mac OSX.