standard-def movie in less than 30 seconds and a high-def movie in less than a minute. A 2Mbps connection gets you playback for a standard-def movie in about a minute and a start time for a high-def movie in about two hours. If you have a 768kbps broadband connection you'll want to plan ahead. Apple suggests a standard-def movie will be ready to play in 1.5 hours and a high-def movie in about eight hours.
I have a broadband connection that manages between 3 and 4Mbps and my Apple TV has notified me that it's ready to play an HD title in between 12 and 20 minutes--the Downloads screen told me that approximately 12-percent of the movie had downloaded. However, when I attempted to play Live Free or Die Hard immediately after that notice appeared I encountered rebuffering errors--where the Apple TV has to stop playback to load more data. This was on the first day rentals were available from the iTunes Store and the Store was likely being taxed heavily. I tried the same test with the recently released Michael Clayton in HD and while I got farther into the movie--an hour and eight minutes--the movie eventually paused to load more data. To help speed your download and prevent such errors, it's a good idea to avoid clogging your network with other downloads--grabbing the latest Mac OS update via Software Update, for example.
If you want to view your HD movie without interruption it's not a bad idea to give the Apple TV some extra time to download more of the movie, even if it tells you that it's ready to play.
In regard to downloads, the speed of your broadband connection is paramount. Wireless 802.11g and n (and wired Ethernet) are faster than anything your broadband connection can deliver. They'll all be able to keep up and then some with data as it's brought into your home. Although 802.11b wireless networking is supported by the Apple TV, it's not a good option as it's too slow to stream video, not to mention that syncing data from a large iTunes library to the Apple TV over this kind of slow connection would take something just under forever.
Watching
When you initiate the download of a rented movie a Rented Movies entry appears in the right-pane of the Apple TV's interface when you select Movies on the left side of the interface. Select Rented Movies and you're taken to a screen that displays movie posters of all the rentals on the Apple TV along with the amount of time remaining before they expire--either days left if you haven't yet started watching a movie or hours left if you have.
Just as with rentals from the iTunes Store, you have 30 days to begin watching your movie before it expires and disappears from the Apple TV's hard drive. Again, when you begin watching you have 24 hours to complete your viewing before the movie disappears. As I mentioned in a previous Playlist blog, you can kinda/sorta work around this by pausing a movie in progress, doing nothing else with your Apple TV, and then unpausing it when you're ready to finish viewing it. You can do this even after the 24-hour limit has passed. But it's a kludgy workaround given that you'll likely want to do other things with your Apple TV.
HD movies are delivered in 720p format (meaning 1280 by 720 pixels at 24 fps) and some, though not all, offer 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround Sound soundtracks. While the Apple TV allows you to upscale output to 1080p, it doesn't deliver native 1080p content.
Sharing
Movies you rent on the Apple TV stay on the Apple TV. You can't transfer them to your computer, iPod, or iPhone. Also, Apple TVs don't talk to one another. If you have two Apple TVs in your house, there's no way to transfer a movie you've rented on one to the
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