Now, I don’t own an Apple TV, and my desktop Mac is far from my living room TV, where I’d want to watch a movie with my wife. So, I broke out my old G4 Titanium laptop so that I could download a movie to it and then plug it into my TV and home stereo for a more cinema-style feel. My G4 warhorse is dated for sure, but it still runs fine, has 1.5 gigs of RAM, a reasonable graphics card and I had used it to edit a feature length film using Final Cut Pro, so it should be fine with any video issues. I figured all I’d need to do was update my iTunes and Quicktime software.

...

Smug with satisfaction at showing my wife how great this new tech was, I hit play, sat back on the couch, and my wife and I proceeded to watch with growing, wincing puzzlement what can best be described as a flipbook version of Jason Bourne kicking Russian ass. His fluid mixed-martial arts were reduced to a strobelight Vogueing dance. Between the choppy video and the fast-paced action and editing, it was simply unwatchable.

...

Feeling a little MacGuyver-like, I decided I would pop the movie on my year-old video iPod then plug that into my TV. Since it was synced with my desktop Mac I reassigned it to my laptop, set it up for movie syncing and nodded to the wife,“Five minutes babe—just gotta transfer the file. No worries.”

Only nothing happened. Checked my cables, checked my settings. Wiped the beads of sweat from my brow and forced a smile to my patient wife on the couch. Went online to Apple’s support message boards: Clickety-clack, come on guys, what’s going on here… and a little helpful info later, found out movie rentals only work with iPods from 2008. Yes, my-less-than-a-year-old iPod is too old and stupid to run movie rentals, it seems. Dandy.