I finally decided to take the download hit and install MovieLink to see what the experience is like. MovieLink requires an ActiveX control and generally I don’t like to install Dot Com apps on my machine. I’m leery of what spyware they might be installing. But this time around I really wanted to see what the movie experience is like, so I decided to take the hit.
Unfortunately I encountered several bumps along the road. After several installation attempts I was unable to complete the installation for Windows Media Player. It kept failing on the “Security” updates. To work around the problem, I had to uninstall the MovieLink manager and reinstall with the RealPlayer option selected instead of Windows Media Player. Not sure why Media player didn’t work, but at least I got to the movie download part successfully.
For a test, I downloaded the free Spider Man 2 trailer. Everything worked just fine. Whew. Now I need to try downloading and watching a full-length movie. I’m interested in two things: how long does it take to download a typical movie and how is battery life impacted while watching the movie.
I can see one problem lurking in the wings. After you download a movie from the website, you have 30 days to watch it–which is reasonable–but once you start you only have 24 hours to finish it. This seems too short.
Here’s what I see happening: You’re on the road and decide to watch a downloaded movie at the end of the day. Maybe you start at 9PM. But then something gets in the way so you have to pause the movie. And reasonably, the next chance you’ll have to watch the movie is the next night at about the same time: 9PM. But unfortunately, the movie will time out at 9PM that next day. Ugh. Minimally the time you should have to watch the movie is 24 hours plus 2 times the length of the movie or so. A 48 hour period would be a lot more customer friendly.
As I’ve mentioned before, what we need are some of the OEMs/resellers to bundle services like MovieLink with their Tablets. It would be great if HP, for instance, sold the TC1100 with a MovieLink service and 6 months of free movies (for a total of 6 movies).
In this way, when customers baulk at there not being a DVD player built in to Tablets, the salesperson can ask the customer what their concern is. If it’s because they want to watch movies while on the road they can point out that the Tablet comes with an introductory movie service and this combo has several benefits–the big one being that you don’t have to lug the weight of the DVD around–which you’ll only use infrequently anyway. Plus, I’m guessing that storing and playing back the movie on the harddrive is kinder to the battery than a DVD player would be. Although I’m guessing on this one.
I’ve met several people that use MovieLink with their Tablets. I look forward to giving the service a full test drive over the next week or so.
Are the movies for movielink not streamed? How big are the DRM’d laden data files? (turns out: ~600mb). hmm interesting. Can Real Video or WMA really match quality with DivX5, XviD, or another MPEG4-based codec though? Maybe WMA, but do they use WMP9…
I too tried Movie Link, and could not get the Windows Media version to work. I chatted with help, and found that they do not work with XP SP2. They stated they would after SP2 was released. I suspect it has something to do with the changes to IE, since I disabled the firewall and still couldn’t get it to work.
Since I don’t really like Real Media I didn’t get it to work.
With SP2 if you download the newest SP2 Updates it will work. I had the same problems at first. I did a Windows update and found a new SP2 rollout and it worked. They must have patched a few things.