Today Apple Computer announced that movie downloads are now available from the iTunes Store (Apple has apparently dropped "Music" from the store title). This first batch of movies comes from Disney and Pixar. Being somewhat of an Apple fan, I wanted to familiarize myself with the new service. I ran software update on my Mac and updated iTunes to version 7.0 and QuickTime to version 7.1.3. After I rebooted the computer, I opened up iTunes and went to the new store. I decided to buy Pirates of the Caribbean-The Curse of the Black Pearl for $9.99. 
 
The movie took just over 2 hours to download. It was 1.64 GB in size. An interesting thing to note was the fact that I started to download the video at school, and realized that the download wasn't going to be completed by the time I was leaving for home. There is now a "pause" feature available to you when you are downloading videos. I clicked on "pause", drove home, initiated my home internet connection, and resumed the movie download. This is a very convenient feature. 
 
Back in March, I wrote a blog entry that discussed the first movie available from iTunes, "High School Musical". In that entry, I mentioned that there were times when the video quality wasn't quite perfect.  
 
I'm happy to say that Apple has fixed that issue. All purchased video content from iTunes is now being encoded using the H.264 codec and looks fantastic. Apple has also increased the resolution of all videos to 640x480 from 320x240. I couldn't tell any difference between the movie that I downloaded and a DVD. It really looks that good.