Apple iTunes DRM Frustrations

Apple recently started offering film rentals and purchases to Irish users via iTunes. For some reason they haven’t started offering TV shows yet, though I suspect that’s down to licensing problems (as usual!)

Last night I thought I’d try out the service, so I rented a film for a couple of Euro.

Since my mac book screen is small and my TV has a nice big screen I thought I’d be able to stream the video to it relatively easily using Connect360.

Unfortunately it simply does not work

Connect 360 cannot “see” the downloaded file in the iTunes folder. I tried copying it to the “Movies” folder, but while that rendered it visible it still won’t actually play. Any attempt at playing returns a totally unhelpful error message on the Xbox.
After doing some searching it would appear that you simply cannot stream rented films! That’s nuts! Seemingly it will work with ones that you “own”, but not with rentals at all!
I wouldn’t mind too much if the Zune selection on Xbox was semi-decent, but the Irish catalogue is very restricted. Sure, you can find some nice “oldies”, but the new releases section is extremely limited.

So if anyone has a sane solution for this I’d love to hear

However I suspect that this is Apple DRM at its worst !