Megatome » iphone

Movie Reviews

iamthechad — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 18:18:35 +0000

Thanks to iTunes movie rentals, I’m finally getting around to watching some of the movies I’ve missed in the last few years. It’s not that I’m living under a rock – I just refuse to go to a store and rent movies. Every time I’ve been to Blockbuster in the last five years has just been an annoying experience. I don’t watch enough movies to justify having a Netflix account.

I already watch almost every movie I buy on my iPhone, (thanks to Handbrake) so downloading movies is a logical nest step for me. And, in an effort to keep posts coming on a semi-regular basis, I thought I might as well start putting up some reviews of the movies I rent.

Movie reviews, coming soon. Because the Internet needs yet another uneducated moron reviewing things.

Not Quite Christmas, But Apple Delivers Anyway With iTunes 7.6

iamthechad — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 01:23:59 +0000

Earlier, I wrote about the fact that it was hard to watch TV series on my iPhone because of the limited options that iTunes allowed for syncing video. Other people must have had the same complaint, since the newly released iTunes 7.6 has settings for syncing "least recent" videos. Yay!

iTunes 7.6 also fixed a nasty bug that would cause Smart Playlists created with a "Video Kind" rule to fail – sometimes horribly.

All I Want For Christmas Is One Little Tweak To iTunes

iamthechad — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:12:13 +0000

With Apple’s push to deliver video on more and more portable devices, I’m surprised that I haven’t seen this complaint yet.

Maybe I’m not looking in the right places. I love watching video on my iPhone. I also have a few season passes to TV shows through the iTunes Music Store. Some shows, like my new favorite Dexter, don’t release any episodes until the entire season is available. Here’s where the problem comes in. The first season of Dexter is 14 episodes, each around 660-670 megabytes in size. I have a 4 gig iPhone, so there’s no way all of the episodes will fit. Luckily, iTunes offers some flexibility in how video is synced to devices. I can select to sync all unwatched episodes of a show, or a subset of 1, 3, 5, or 10 unwatched episodes. For some reason, though, I can only pick the most recent unwatched episodes. WTF? Why the hell would I download an entire series, then choose to only sync the last 10 episodes? Why on earth didn’t Apple put in a similar set of options to let me sync the first 1, 3, 5, 10 episodes?

As it stands now, I have to watch enough episodes on my computer or my video iPod to be able to sync remaining episodes with the iPhone. I can create a smart playlist that keeps track of the oldest X number of unwatched episodes, but it doesn’t sync to the iPhone. iTunes sees the playlist as belonging to the Music category, and I can only choose to sync music videos, not TV shows within playlists.

C’mon Apple. I know this can’t be too hard. Make it easy for me to watch video on my iPhone like all the hype tells me I should do.