By September 13, 2009

iTunes Extras – review

First there was DVD and additional content being offered on DVD like deleted scenes and additional information about movies. Then came the battle of Japanese monsters Godzilla and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, or in other words: Toshiba (HD DVD) and Sony (BlueRay), that was won by Sony. Now comes new development in the area of home entertainment: iTunes Extras – something like additional content offered in DVD and BlueRay but without the disk, everything is over the Internet.

Once you purchase a movie on iTunes with iTunes Extras you get physically 2 files, 2 items:

Of course you can just click on the movie file and forget that iTunes Extras exists – you can just watch the movie:

… but if you click on the iTunes Extras part of the movie, you get this:

… which requires big resolution, because otherwise there is a lot of scrolling (it is not scalable):

While it is not additional content, chapters in iTunes Extras make searching for some movie part, much faster:

… more interesting are features:

… that include deleted scenes that might be interesting or not (depending on the movie):

Note: that in case of that particular movie the quality of video of deleted scenes was extremely low. The same effect one can observe on older DVD and BlueRay discs too.

Of course you can take screenshots from the iTunes movie playback but in features you can find also a photo gallery:

Finally links to related websites can be found in “more” section:

Advantages:

* deleted scenes
* some other additional content available
* better navigation within movie through chapters

Disadvantages compared to DVD and BlueRay (that however may be removed in future versions):

* no HD version
* no multiple sound tracks (like director’s comments etc)
* no subtitles

Conclusion: Apple, by releasing iTunes Extras (available in iTunes 9 and newer) has practically killed the need to buy physical discs. At this moment iTunes Extras requires Mac OS X or Windows (we tested on Windows Vista) computer or Apple TV and are not working on iPhone and iPod touch. In future we can imagine that both iPhone and Apple’s tablet will support iTunes Extras too. As of now the only mobile way to use iTunes Extras is to use it on Macbook.

Posted in: Phones

About the Author:

Seasoned tech blogger. Host of the Tech Addicts podcast.
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