questions on itunes movie buy

[smuggs]

i have just bought an ipad2 16gb for 299.99 which i think is the going rate so happy with that.

i have 103(815gb) films in mkv which itunes does not like. so i have do problem buying from itunes.

i selected the film i wanted and payed my 7.99 which got me a hd and sd copy which i thought was great value for money.

2 problems the first they wont let me play it on my wd streaming box.

and the main problem is when i play it on my ipad2 it looks fairly good not far off blu ray so happy but is in 16.9 ratio so i get black bars and then when i press the button on ipad to fill the screen it looks awful so im guessing they though i had bought it for an apple tv to play through a widescreen tv. did i miss the option to say it was for an ipad.

or is there any free or paid software which will convert down to 4.3ratio so i can have a 2 copys of the bought film.

 

[Clare Newsome]

Re playing your MKV movies, the app AV Player HD should enable you to view them all on your iPad - click here for more

And re film with black bars: that widescreen format is how the director intended the movie to be watched.

Re not being able to watch iTunes movies on your WD - that is just how Apple wants it; it wants to keep you within its walled garden of software/hardware...

 

[smuggs]

thanks clare for your time i dont mind the apple keeping there stuff in house so to speak. the black bars are ok cause i have selected a black ipad but i guess a white one would be a nightmare. plus i know you always get black bars it just seems that they are are 50% of the screen.

i like the sound off that app but my itunes wont even let me drop a mkv file onto it to sync with ipad. do i have stream the mkv files rather than store them in itunes.

 

[Clare Newsome]

You drag and drop the MKV files into the app, which sorts the conversion. More info here :

http://www.whathifi.com/blog/our-top-10-apps-for-video

 

[Anonymous]

Re not being able to watch iTunes movies on your WD - that is just how Apple wants it; it wants to keep you within its walled garden of software/hardware...

Let's not give the movie studios a free ride here - Apple only licences the rights to distribute the content and were required by the studios to add a DRM wrapper, in order to control where people can view the content. It was a similar situation with music, until Apple convinced the music labels that dropping DRM wouldn't have a negative impact on their revenue stream.

If Apple's 2007 "Thoughts on Music" open letter is anything to go by, they are required to ensure that the Fairplay DRM doesn't get circumvented. If it does, Apple has just a few weeks to repatch it, or content owners can pull their content from the store. Licencing FairPlay to WD, or anyone else, would require disclosing the DRM keys to third parties. Apple then has a much harder time fulfilling it's committment to the studios to keep FairPlay locked down and secure.

Apple has set precedent by successfully lobbying for the removal of DRM from iTunes-store purchases, and I'm not saying that they don't feel there is benefit to keeping customers locked into a "walled garden" when it comes to movie purchases, but let's not forget that the real control lies with the content producers themselves. None of the major movie studios have ever released their content on a format that wasn't locked down tightly with DRM.

 

[smuggs]

what you said makes sense and im either going to buy an apple tv or 50 dollers on drm removel software and the change on itunes films. not sure what to do.