[jzwinck]

Just last night I rented a movie on iTunes and I couldn't play it. This was on a recent MacBook connected to my receiver and then TV via HDMI. After rebooting the computer and fighting it quite a bit, I found that it would play if I unplugged the HDMI cable. Now I have previously had glitches where iTunes popped up an error saying my playback device was not allowed, but I solved those by unplugging and trying again. This time it was just stuck. Then I plugged the HDMI cable into the TV instead, and used optical audio from there to the receiver. This "worked," but robbed me of true 5.1 sound.

All of these technologies ought to just work. But they are over-complicated and often break down even for obvious scenarios like "I want to pay to watch a movie with surround sound."

I'm pretty sure DRM was somehow to blame last night, because other videos played fine. I don't know why some iTunes downloads are worse than others but I feel like I never have problems with the SD versions.