28 MAXIMUMPC | MAY 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
A
pple’s tight connection with Disney
(owner of the ABC television network
and Pixar animation studio), its sup-
port for high-defi nition H.264 video, and a
slick set-top box for playing your favorite
TV shows and movies in your living room,
render the iTunes Store an attractive propo-
sition for home-theater enthusiasts. Too bad
its video is limited to 720p.
But let’s start with what we like. The
video quality of content on the iTunes Store
is superior to all the WMV services (although
Vongo’s quality is pretty good), which we
mainly attribute to Apple’s use of H.264.
High-defi nition fi les look very good and,
unlike many of the other services we tested,
were noticeably superior to standard-defi ni-
tion DVD quality, although the lower-bit-rate
downloads still fall noticeably short of the
quality offered by Blu-ray discs.
Naturally, all this comes at a price:
Standard-def movies rent for the going
rate of $4, but HD rentals cost $5. The big
problem with iTunes’s current HD playback
is that it works only with the Apple TV; you
can’t view high-def content via your PC.
TV shows cost $2 per episode to own, but
you’ll get a better deal if you purchase an
entire season of episodes. For people who
watch only a few TV series each season,
buying the downloads could be a better deal
than paying for cable TV—if you don’t mind
the low resolution.
Watching downloaded video on your PC
is all well and good, if you live in a dorm or
have a 40-inch monitor. How does iTunes
work when you want to watch your pur-
chased or rented video on a TV or on the go?
Reasonably well, as long as you purchase
Apple gear. Rented movies work with any
current-gen iPhone or iPod (5th-gen and olderiPod users are out of luck) and follow the same
basic rules as all the other services we’ve test-
ed: You have 30 days to start watching and 24
hours to fi nish.
If your PC isn’t in your living room, you’ll
need to buy an Apple TV, which will enable
you to stream music and photos as well as
content you rent or purchase from iTunes. You
can either set it up to make a straight copy of
your iTunes library or stream the fi le in iTunes
across your network. Copying media to the
Apple TV means it will always be available
whether or not your PC is powered up, but this
will rapidly fi ll the device’s small drive (40GB
or 160GB). As you’d expect from an Apple
product, the interface is slick and the purchas-
ing experience is simple—it easily passes the
“mom” test. Movie playback starts as soon
as the buffer is suffi ciently fi lled, and you can
fast-forward, rewind, and skip to chapters
using the included remote. Because the Apple
TV uses purely passive cooling, it’s important
to make sure you leave plenty of room around
it. And don’t place anything on top of it—it
doesn’t like that. (See In the Lab on page 72
for more info on the Apple TV.)
The biggest problem with iTunes right
now is its catalog. While there are tons of TV
shows (nothing from NBC or Universal, butABC, CBS, Fox, CW, and many cable chan-
nels are well represented), the movie selection
is paltry and even new releases were showing
up a week or more later than they were on the
other services we tested (that might change as
time goes on). And if the standard-defi nition
content is sparse, the HD content is nearly
nonexistent. Only seven titles on our list of 25
new releases were available for rent in HD.
That’s better than the two HD titles Vudu had
to offer; on the other hand, Vudu had 18 of our
25 new releases available for rent, compared
to iTunes’s 10. Apple didn’t have any HD titles
available for purchase (Vudu had two)—not
that we’d recommend that, given the current
state of iTunes DRM.
Our verdict may change with time, but
for now, there simply aren’t enough titles
to consider the iTunes Store a serious
rental competitor.iTunes Store
Apple led the downloadable music charge, but will it have the same mojo with movies?
You can buy and rent movies and TV shows using iTunes on your PC, but if you want to
watch in high def, you’ll need an Apple TV.VERDICT6
Hardware: $230 and up
Movie rentals: $2 to $
Movie purchases:
$10 to $
TV episodes: $
http://www.itunes.comThe Apple TV sure looks sexy, but it
doesn’t even include the basic cables you
need to hook it up to a TV. Where’s the
10-cent component-video cable, Apple?DOWNLOAD
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