News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

January 25, 2008

itunes_store

How to prop open the 24 hour rental window

Posted Jan. 25, ’08, 9:30 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | iTunes » iTunes Store

iTunes rentalsThere’s been a lot of complaining about the 24 hour window that Apple offers for movie rentals—and rightly so, I think. Those with small children especially know how difficult is to watch a two hour movie in a twenty-four hour period. Fortunately, our Macworld colleague Chris Breen has pointed out that the implementation contains a slight loophole.

Chris had paused a rental that he’d been watching on his iPod nano and then left it. Coming back to it the next day, after the rental period should have expired, he found that he could still resume playback of the movie, but the second he tried to leave by hitting the iPod’s menu key, he was presented with an ultimatum: resume playback or delete the rental. Forcing a restart of the iPod deleted the movie from the player.

We’re not sure yet whether or not this will work when you’re watching a movie on your computer or on the Apple TV, but there’s a good chance that it will. The upshot, then, is that you can resume playback after twenty-four hours have elapsed, provided you don’t try to do anything else with your iPod before then. And we’d presume that trying to move the files while you’re part way through is strictly verboten.


3 Comments

Joe said:

I did this with my macbook pro and when I came back the next day, it would play the audio but not the video... It was just a grey screen, and when I quit out of the movie, it told me that I had to either continued playback, or delete video.

Hope that helps, -Joe

January 25, 2008 9:41 AM
Sean Coffee Author Profile Page said:

Here's what I want to know: When iTunes eliminates a rental movie from your library, where does it go? I kind of don't like the idea of Apple remotely trashing things on my desktop.

January 25, 2008 10:04 AM
sdkay said:

sean coffee: Apple doesn't remotely do anything to your Mac, as far as I know. iTunes (on your computer) sees that the movie is past expiration, and simply deletes it, locally, from your computer.

January 25, 2008 6:00 PM

Leave a comment

 



Visit other IDG sites: