techno.blog("Dion")

As I got ready for my 10 hour flight to Europe, I booted up iTunes and looked around for some interesting TV shows and movies. I found a few new things that I thought would be good for wasting some of those hours away, so I put them on the iTunes tab.

Fast forward to 30k feet in the sky, when I pulled out the laptop after the obligatory 10 minutes of staring as we took off. I went to start one of the shows and was shocked to see:

You are kidding me. How had the iTunes install experience now grabbed the latest Quicktime with it? This reminded me of the fuss that DRM has been making with Spore and how all this effort is going into the bad side of usage. Installing Spore and getting a bad hard drive would make you hate the darn thing and never buy anything of its ilk again. There has to be a better way.

If I had just downloaded a movie file, then even without Quicktime i could have played it.

Believe it or not, I have not been an iTunes purchaser. I didn’t want to deal with the DRM and the mess associated with multiple computers and syncing.

However, I was waiting for my flight from SFO to LHR and thought I would finally give it a whirl. The experience was very poor.

The first problem was in purchasing the darn film I wanted. iTunes kept giving me a generic “Error, try again” message. It finally worked on the five try for some reason.

Then the kicker. The airplane food was over, so I could sit back and relax wit the show of my choosing. I go to play, and get:

“This computer is not authorized to play “Your Movie”. Would you like to authorize it?”

This is why I hate iTunes. I want to be able to just download and play things without all of the hoops. I have just purchased the movie on this computer so LET ME PLAY IT :/

Instead, I have to choose between Bee Movie and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. I choose my RSS reader, podcasts, and a good book.