Microsoft finally delivers Live video rental

My ISP will charge if your total bandwidth for the month exceeds 50GB. With 720p movies that's only 2 movies and no windows fixes, yikes. HD content downloading isn't feasible for a while.

Next is how long would it take to download it? Typical ISP bandwidth in N. America is 1.5Mbps, or 192KByte/sec. If a 720p movie is 25GB, it would take a minimum of 37.9 hours for a single movie. At 2.5Mbps (320KByte/sec) it would still take 22.8 hours.

For starters your files sizes assume its a HD rip directly from the HD-DVD luckily the are all highly compressed VC1's in WMV format so the filesize is about 4-5 gig a movie which is much more viable.

The range of content SUCKS!!! is it just me or does it look a lot like the first run HD-DVD's that came out across this side of the pond.

So anotherwords badly encouded movies from teh first run reencoded in VC1 for the second time with all the not so special features ripped out.

And one last thing acording to the press release i read ALL movies on Live download were supposed to be HD as well as SP what gives only 5 films with HD version and they all suck ass.

Colour me not impressed with Microsofts first stab

MS can stick the movies up their aris, that goes for Apple TV too.
I will stick with netflix or my local movie rental store.
Regulas

Try to download that service in Indonesia. You WILL learn about PATIENCE. My grps flatrate only get about 10 GB a month with 99% uptime. There still no flatrate 3G or event HSDPA in Indonesia. Try calculate your self @ 5,9 KB/s how long to download the movie.

I'd bet that MS uses much heavier compression for downloadable HD content than BD or HD discs, where full quality 1080p content takes 25 GBytes.

720p releases of new movies on torrent networks usually take 4 GBytes, which is much more feasible to download, I reckon the Live marketplace videos will be similar in size.

Had a look on my xbox last night says zodiac at 720p is 6.9GB. Still think it will take a while to download, but maybe worth a try if they get more content.

Only a few contries are deemed worthy of the video rental functionality at this time.......which sucks.

Why is it that everyone ignores the obvious point? If you squeeze HD content hard enough to push a 25GB quart into a 4GB pint pot, you are going to lose something. In this case it's resolution and color depth. You think you're downloading 720p video, and you're not, not really. Compressing the HD content so heavily thta it takes up about as much room as a standard DVD movie, can you guess what the result of that heavy compression is? Quality that is little more than that attained by DVD, that's what.

I keep reading comments by people who think that optical discs are dead and that download is the way ahead. I think those people are wrong and missing the point of HD media. True HD content is so large that it's not practical to download it over the 'net or store it on a home system. 20 Blu-Ray movies comes close to 1TB, if you add in all the special features discs then you're over 1TB, for 20 titles. It's simply impractical for download or home media centers to handle HD content yet. Cable and satellite claim to do HD as well, trouble is they don't have the bandwidth to really do HD, so they compress it, you get smudgy pictures for fast action scenes where the action goes all blocky and explosions that are spectacular in the cinema or in Blu-Ray/HD-DVD. You get color depth problems with obvious false contours in the picture. 

But folks can go one claiming downloads are here, when they're not, I'll continue watching movies on discs until we all have the Internet equivalent of gigabit ethernet to our homes and peta-byte discs are common-place.

The whole point is you don't need to store these movies at home, you'll just download them when you want to watch them.

The file sizes are much smaller than BD and HDDVD because 720p has a resolution of 1280x720, 1080p is 1920x1080.

Sure the quality isn't going to compare with BD and HDDVD at the moment but as bandwidth speeds increase we'll soon be downloading or even streaming 1080p movies directly into our homes. 

This has got to be better than buying hundreds of silly little discs that just sit on a bookshelf gathering dust. 

Ask yourself;

Do you really need a movie collection when they are all available for immediate download? 
How often do you watch those discs? 
Are you really going to replace all those DVD movies with HD versions? And replace them again when even higher definition standards arrive?

I think Microsoft should for once be congratulated for pushing the boundaries and I hope the movie studios realise soon that discs are dead!

I agree with the guy on here who points out downloading HD-DVD content thats compressed is pointless, and we may as well just stick to downloading DVD content. 

The concept of downloading DVDs to the X-box for playback seems a good one to me as i currently use my XBOX as DVD drive already. 

The fact that only one film distributor has signed up is very poor !

Either microsoft are being greedy and want to much cut from the sales , or the film distributors are stuck with same old fashioned view as the music industry was 5 years ago , that online distribution is for pirating kids and they are not interested. 
If thats the case they need to wake up and smell the money they could make with this. Surely the more delivery methods to consumers the better. 

I hope MS gets more DECENT content onboard soon.