OK, so I gave the new Amazon Unbox service a whirl this evening. My mission, to rent the movie Napoleon Dynamite (yes, I'm one of the few people that has never seen it). The first thing I had to do was download and install the Amazon Unbox video player. Once installed, I entered my Amazon account login information and I was ready to download. I purchased the rental through the normal Amazon checkout process and once complete, the Amazon Unbox video software on my PC was magically notified that I had purchased the rental and immediately started the download. So as far as the actual download process, piece of cake.

I was not able to start watching the movie until it was 43% downloaded, so don't expect to start watching as soon as the download begins. I'm sure they have some sort of algorithm that won't let you start watching until it's far enough along it won't catch up with the download. The video player is very simple and the quality of the movie is what you would expect from a DVD. For what it is designed to do, the process was trouble free and extremely easy

Now for the techie details. I received 2 wmv files, a small preview file and the actual movie file. I tried the normal geek stuff by copying these files to different machines to try and play them without Amazon's software, but no luck. The only way I could play the movie outside of the Amazon video player was by using Windows Media Player on the same machine I have the Amazon software installed. If you try to play the movie with Windows Media Player on another PC, WMP launches a "License Validation" window which pulls up the Amazon Unbox home page. So WMP and Amazon definitely have some hooks going on for validation.

For rentals, you have 30 days to watch the movie after you download it. When you first click on "Play" , a popup screen reminds you that once you start, you have only 24 hours to access the movie. After that 24 hours it automatically gets deleted from your library. For a purchase, there is no time expiration.

Sorry, Mac users need not apply. Amazon's response to why there is no Mac or iPod support is Apple Computer Inc. has exclusive rights to the hardware and software that would make this possible. Because of these restrictions, we are unable to make Amazon Unbox compatible with these products. While it is possible to run one of the approved operating systems on computers made by Apple, we cannot guarantee the performance of Amazon Unbox on these systems.

And don't expect to download a movie and burn it to a DVD. You can't do it. You can only watch these movies from a computer or Media Center PC running Amazon's software. So even if you purchase it, you don't really "own" it. And the DRM discussions continue...

UPDATE: Tom over at CNET is not having much luck with the Amazon Unbox software. As other users are starting to post their experiences, he's not the only one. I guess I was lucky the software actually worked for me.