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I recently ordered my self a couple of Blu-ray movies from play.com as they had a special “buy 1 get 1 free” offer on at the time. My choices were Valkyrie and I, Robot, both of which I have yet to see at the Cinema. They turned up today and I noticed Valkyrie also included a ‘Digital Copy’ of the film for you to load on your iPod/iPhone. This was the first time I’d come across this before and wondered how it worked. So I went ahead and popped the bonus DVD into my Mac mini and was greeted by this screen.

Once I’d double clicked the icon, iTunes opened and Valkyrie was mounted in the Devices section of the sidebar (much like an audio cd) I then selected that and got greeted with this screen.

The code is found on the inside of the Blu-ray case. Once entered, Apple authorises the movie and it becomes yours as if you’d bought it off the iTunes Store. The file is then copied over from the DVD into your Library.

Overall I’m fairly impressed with the whole process. Whenever I’ve bought a standard DVD lately I’ve always created a digital copy for use in Front Row or my Apple TV. With Blu-ray I’m limited as I don’t have a Blu-ray drive in any of my computers. I’m hoping this isn’t some Sony UMD fad and that more studios decide on including this with their movies.

At last Apple have updated the AppleTV to bring it in line with iTunes 8.0 and the new iPhone/iPod update. We can now create and play Genius playlists right on our TV’s. The update also adds some nice new features such as On-the-go playlists, HDTV Shows, Music Video playlists and finally a Standby option! There are also numerous security fixes that bring the AppleTV up to date with iTunes security wise.

To update your AppleTV just navigate to Settings > General > Update Software.

Mine had locked up when I turned the TV on (hopefully the new standby feature will help prevent this in the future) so I unplugged the power cable, reconnected it, and it automatically installed the update when it rebooted.

Amongst the updates to iTunes 8.0, Apple didn’t really advertise the fact they have now enabled us to use our own descriptions for Movies and TV Shows. This is a nice bonus for all those who like to add their personal dvd collections to their iTunes library. It previously needed a 3rd party script to enable the editing of descriptions.

Custom descriptions now possible in iTunes 8.0

iTunes 8.0 was released just after Apple’s latest Special Event, ‘Let’s Rock’ on September 9th. The biggest new feature of this new version was the ability to create ‘Genius’ playlists. Genius playlist’s automatically create a playlist of either 25, 50, 75 or 100 songs that group similar songs together for you. Genius uses different factors such as Genre, Play Count, Rating, Year, Artist and also information from other iTunes users via the online Genius ‘Cloud’, to try and create a great sounding playlist for you. This works very well to be fair to Apple.

Genius playlists are new to iTunes 8.0

Not only does this feature work in iTunes but it also works on your iPhone (with 2.1 update) and on the newest iPod’s (Touch, Nano-chromatic and Classic 120GB). Although the feature on these devices does not seem to connect to the Genius ‘Cloud’ to aid the process, it still works great. It’s an ideal alternative to creating your own ‘On the Go’ playlist, as it’s less time consuming and, if you’re anything like me, I take an age to make up my own playlist!

One of the ways I think Apple could improve the feature even more is to add an option to create a Genius playlist that will fit onto an 80-min CD-R. I created a 25 song playlist the other day and found myself removing 6 or 7 songs to get it to fit on a CD I was making to listen to in the Car. How cool would it be if you could just choose ‘Create CD’ from the drop-down list. So if you’re listening Apple…..