Amazon Unbox • Hacker News Board

Post by jakep36 » Fri, Sep 21, 2007, 1:47 PM UTC

I had a terrible experience with Amazon's Unbox last night. I wanted to watch Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, and found that I could rent it on Unbox. After I found out that I couldn't do this on my mac, I fired up Parallels to give it a shot. Then install of the video player on Windows took many steps including upgrading my systems DRM. After that it went ahead and tried to download the 2 gb+ movie to it's default location under C:\Documents and Settings\... without ever asking me if I wanted it there or not. My C drive on my parallels system doesn't have enough space, so the download failed. I found in preferences where I could switch it to another drive so I tried to switch it to my mapped drive on my mac, and it wouldn't let me since it "wasn't a local drive". Now maybe I've been away from Windows for too long, but I thought this was ridiculous. I'm used to developing on the mac and cloning my development environment by mounting drives and having those available to me as if they were part of my local system. Why does this software care if it was a local drive or not? So I had to pick another "local" drive that I created in Windows and everything seemed okay. I then found it impossible to download that original file. It still said not enough disk space and I determined that the file was still trying to point to it's original location. I probably could of figured out where that was stored behind the scenes and fixed it, but I was getting frustrated and wanted to watch the movie. I deleted it and it warned me that I'll have to rent it again. I was mad, but considered that my easiest solution. I rented it again and nothing happened. I was charged for another rental, but when I went online it said that I'd already downloaded the file. WTF?

I know that Amazon may be handicapped by what it can do on this platform (system based DRM and such), but my question is: why not develop these applications first on another platform (mac or linux) and get it done right first with a group of users that really want access to this type of service, then port it to windows with a precedence of how it should work? Also, I don't understand how if I have problems with this, the average user is going to make it work. Have my standard just been raised in the past year or so using non-windows environments causing my frustration levels to increase when I run into problems with this, or is this just another poor user experience due to lack of effort by the software developers?

Post by jklubnik » Fri, Sep 21, 2007, 6:06 PM UTC

I also had a less than ideal experience while playing with Unbox. During setup it asks for your username and password, but does not verify that they are valid. I mistyped one, and as a result it was unable to download the item I had purchased. This wouldn't be a big deal except that there is no way to change your username and password through the software. I finally figured that the only way to change them was to uninstall the software and then install it again. Unfortunately, the uninstaller is not smart enough to kill the Unbox process before attempting to uninstall, so it hangs indefinitely. I had to make sure Unbox was completely dead before the uninstall would work.

In short, it took much longer than it should have to purchase and watch a video. And all of my troubles could have been avoided with either a simple verification during setup, or an option to change the password somewhere in the software (this may be missing because of DRM restrictions).

The quality of the video was fine, and the download was reasonably fast. The user experience was terrible, as was the UI for the Unbox software.

My parents (smart, but not terribly computer savvy) can purchase and enjoy media via iTunes. They would not be able to use Unbox.