After holding off for over a year, I finally started watching Lost. My roommate had some bootleg Chinese DVDs of Lost - Season 1, so I started with those. But none of our DVD players would read Episode 6… I decided to download it from iTunes. iTunes is an excellent music player, and the combination of the iTunes player, the iTunes Music Store, and the iPod is an excellent music combination. But how does iTunes stand up as a Music player and service?

DRM

One of the reasons that the iTunes Music Store works is because the DRM is relatively liberal. In most cases, it doesn’t get in my way - I can burn CDs, I can share over our network, and I can play it on my iPods. How does the same system work for movies? You can play it on one model of iPod, you cannot share it over the network, and as far as I can tell, you cannot burn it to a DVD - at least, not as a regaular DVD that home players can read. Basically you can play it in iTunes (more on that below) and you can watch it on an iPod. Compared to Apple’s music offerings, movies fall way short. Why can’t I stream it to another iTunes user? Why can’t I burn it to DVDs and watch it wherever I want?
UPDATE: As Scott Stevenson notes, not only can you watch them on the iPod, but you can hook the iPod up to a TV. I think this is still lacking compared to music on an iPod - where you can not only hook the iPod up to your stereo, but also burn a CD.

iTunes Movie Player

iTunes is an excellent music player application. But after trying to use it as a movie player, I don’t think it’s as capable. First, iTunes provides three ways to watch movies: Full Screen, in the side bar, or in a separate window. You control which way iTunes should initially present the movie using iTunes preferences. There’s no way to control the initial size in any other way. And if you select anything besides Full Screen, iTunes doesn’t provide a way to get the movie up to Full Screen without going back to the preferences. Once a movie starts playing full screen, there are a number of ways to get it to play the other ways - none of them very intuitive. For example, if you set iTunes to watch movies at Full Screen and start playing, the movie will go to full screen. Now click the mouse. The movie will switch to a the sidebar. Click again and it moves to a separate window. Now close the window. It switches to the side bar, which is not what I expect to happen when I close a movie window. Pause the movie and start playing again. It will stay in the window. But go back to iTunes and double-click on the movie - it will open full screen again. iTunes needs a way to switch the movie viewer size in a simple, predictable way - just like DVD Player, and Quicktime Player. iTunes does a good job of allowing you to view and search your movies separate from your music, but falls down as a capable movie player.

Quality

The movie quality was OK, but not great. During most scenes, I didn’t notice any quality problems. Large areas of black looked posterized ad pixelated, but everything else just had a soft look. I didn’t mind. But watching these on a larger, flat-screen TV is probably not a very good experience. More than anything, I’m disappointed that Lost wasn’t available in a widescreen format. ABC shows the HD version in widescreen, so why shouldn’t Apple distribute that version as well? Or at least an option?

How does it stack up?

If the iTunes Music Store’s success is measured as a combination of an awesome portable player (the iPod), a respectable desktop application (iTunes), and relatively lenient DRM, then I think the iTunes Movie Store just doesn’t stack up. It has a decent portable, but the DRM stricter, and the player less capable - It provides less features and functionality in almost every respect when compared to its music components.