Delay after renting

[Tech198]

When i was all setup to watch 'Hugo', i found when i click 'Play', on the remote, i see 'Ready to play 1 hour 2 minutes"

What does this mean? I thought you had instant watch. (apart from the small buffering time).

 

[chenks]

depends entirely on your internet connection and available bandwidth.
if it said 1 hours 2 minutes then you appear to have a very slow connection.

 

[LaWally]

99% of the time I can rent and play movies without incident. They are available to play within 10-15 seconds of renting.

Every so often I'll rent a movie that does not show up in my "rented" list for an hour or more after renting it. If I try to rent it [again], iTunes tells me that I have already rented the movie. If I check for rentals to download, iTunes tells me there is nothing awaiting download. In such cases one just needs to be patient.

On two occasions I have had movies stop playing and tell me they will be ready to play in an hour or so. Huh? In one case the delay was a few minutes and in another case the delay was over an hour.

If you are consistently seeing delays, the problem may very well be a slow internet connection or other network problem. Otherwise, I would attribute them to problems on Apple's side.

Apple had a server outage last evening in the cloud that lasted for over an hour from about 7:15PM EDT to 8:35PM. No one could download or stream purchased movies or TV shows.

So Apple is not immune to problems.

 

[steve-p]

There is another type of glitch with rental downloads as well. As already mentioned, you can normally begin playback within a few seconds, all good so far. However a couple of times I've paused a movie a few minutes in, then when I hit play again to resume, it refuses to do it until the movie download finishes, and it won't restart from the beginning either. I suspect the OP was seeing a similar problem where it decides for whatever (incorrect) reason it doesn't have enough buffered to attempt playback, when it actually does. It nearly always works properly though. It's rare that I have any issues renting movies.

 

[smp99]

Newbee here.

If I rent a movie via ATV, where does the movie get stored? iCloud?

If I rent a movie via iTunes, I understand that it will get stored somewhere on the local computer.

So, is it usually better to order via itunes, then stream locally?

 

[chenks]

Newbee here.
If I rent a movie via ATV, where does the movie get stored? iCloud?

gets stored on the internal memory of the device.

If I rent a movie via iTunes, I understand that it will get stored somewhere on the local computer.

correct

So, is it usually better to order via itunes, then stream locally?

makes no real difference if you plan on viewing on the appletv.
either way the rental still has to download for you to watch it.

rentals don't technically "stream". it uses a method called "progressive download".