HT1551 I ordered a rental movie on my computer and want to watch it on my 1st generation apple TV and it is not showing up there...any suggestions?

Question

I ordered a rental movie on my computer and want to watch it on my 1st generation apple TV and it is not showing up there...any suggestions?

Answer 1

I had same problem last night with a movie rental not showing up under the 'Rented' tab in iTunes/Movies on my iMac: as I had no other rentals, there was no 'Rented' tab at all.
In iTunes 11, the Downloads icon only appears next to the Search bar while there is an active download. Once any  downloads are finished, the icon disappears.  I had no icon so I had to assume the downloading had finished (in the previous UI you could check download progress even after they had finished).
My movie rental did, however, show up under 'Rented Movies' under the 'Movies' tab in iTunes/Devices/(select any i/device) so I knew it was somewhere in my iTunes.  Yet, we couldn't access it via Apple TV.
I fiddle around for a bit, restarting iTunes, restarting the iMac, to no avail.  Then I did a little housekeeping and moved a different movie I'd imported awhile ago, from the 'Home Videos' tab under iTunes/Movies.  Under File/Get Info, the 'Media Kind' was incorrectly set to 'Home Video' so I changed it to 'Movie'.  Thus the file was moved over into the Movies tab.  Hey Presto!  The Rented tab suddenly showed up, and there was my rented movie!
This is the second time a movie rental did not show up after downloading.  Unfortunately my husband initiated the download so we figured he must've messed up somehow as he's not as familiar with iTunes as me.  Hence we opted to download the movie under a different iTunes account, which worked the second time with no problem.  Needless to say the invoice for the original download had no problem in finding us, hence we were effectively being charged twice for the same movie!  We have to contact apple support (such a hassle) but hopefully they will understand the issue (that's the difficult bit) and they are usually good at refunding when they finally accept the customer is genuine in their claim.
In case anyone is tempted to critique my method, we download rentals through iTune on our computer as we had too many problems trying to rent via Apple TV.  Often the movie was not available to watch for many hours after it was rented, even though we'd start 'download' halfway through the day and sit down at night to watch it!  We have also had problems with movies that kept stopping during viewing because it wasn't streaming fast enough.  We'd give some time and come back to viewing, only to encounter the same.  One time we gave gave up and tried again the next evening, only to find the movie expired.  There is meant to be 48 hours after you've started viewing to resume watching a movie.  Apple's only response to this was to advise we needed a broadband internet connection to stream the movie - this was despite me already telling them we have broadband.
Anyway, I hope this helps anyone experiencing similar issues with movie downloads.