Just as with anything else purchased from the iTunes Store, some restrictions apply.

If movies and TV shows are coming in at 640-by-480, do I have to do anything special to make them play on my iPod? (Incidentally, 640-by-480 is now also the resolution for TV shows available for download through iTunes Apple went back and re-encoded older material to the larger frame size.) For a widescreen movie, the width is always 640 pixels, but the height will be less than 480 pixels (and vary depending on the aspect ratio used for the original film). Movies use the same video codec, but are now available in 640-by-480-pixel resolution-“near-DVD quality,” according to Apple-or four times the number of pixels you’ll find in a 320-by-240 video. That looked good on an iPod, but was very small for a high-resolution computer screen, not to mention a television. Prior to the addition of movies, all video content on the iTunes Store was encoded using the H.264 codec at a size of 320-by-240 pixels. Is that going to be true of these movies, too? I bought a TV show on iTunes and it wasn’t great in terms of picture quality. On most broadband connections the time to download the movie will be much less than the movie’s running time, so by the time you get to the end, the entire thing will have been downloaded. And you can watch the movie even while it’s downloading-just double-click on the movie and it’ll begin to play. This could be particularly useful if you’re browsing the iTunes Store at a wireless hot spot and decide to purchase a movie, but want to wait until you get home to download it. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs” (a 1GB file with a 107-minute running time) on a home DSL line.īut what if I don’t have that much time on my hands?Īdds a download manager, which makes it easy for you to reorganize your download order, as well as pause a download to resume later.

In fact, it took us exactly an hour to download M. But realistically, it will take most people more like and hour to download a film. When announcing the service to the media, Steve Jobs said that it would take a user with a 5-Mbps Internet connection-a faster-than-usual broadband speed that’s becoming more common but is still far from universally available-about 30 minutes to download a whole movie. When compared to music or even TV shows, yes.

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