iTunes movie rental expiry on iPods

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iTunes movie rental expiry on iPods

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Q: I’m curious about the iTunes movie rentals. I was wondering if I were to rent a few movies and transfer them to my iPod, would they be still be deleted even if I didn’t plug the iPod into a computer for about a month?

- Danny

A: Yes, iTunes movie rentals are deleted when they expire regardless of which device they are stored on. The iPod itself has a clock, so regardless of whether you connect your iPod to your iTunes library or not, it will use its internal clock to check the expiry time of a given rental, and the rental will be expired/deleted when that time passes.

Note that even changing the clock on the iPod is not an option, as there is still an internal clock that is not user-settable. In fact, if you change the time on your iPod classic or iPod nano and then reset the device, you’ll find that it always returns to the correct time, even without connecting it to your computer.

In fact, it has been speculated that the lack of a similar “secure clock” in earlier iPod models may be a reason why movie rentals are in fact not available for the fifth-generation iPod models.

As an aside, if you are actually watching a rented movie when it expires, the iPod will permit you to finish watching the movie, even pausing it or navigating backward and forward throughout, until you actually exit the movie. Further, the iPod will even notify you when you stop watching the movie that the time limit on it has expired, and provide you with the option to either resume watching it, or confirm that you do in fact want to delete the movie.

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