So last night I decided to try Amazon Unbox Movie downloads. I read about it over at Fransen’s blog, where is using the Tivo feature. I tried “A Scanner Darkly“.

What is cool is, I use my Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender (I’m running Vista Ultimate). The Unbox video (even though DRM’d) played through the extender. Pretty sweet, exactly what I wanted. The one downer is it won’t play until fully downloaded, whereas if you use the unbox client on the pc, you can start playing it like 2 minutes after it starts downloading. They have a web load feature where you can order a movie or TV show from a remote pc and your PC at home will start downloading it, so it can be ready when you get home. That will probably be the next thing I try.

Still looking for the ultimate combination where I dont have to buy cable service, but still can get all the media I want and watch it on my TV. The quest continues, but for sure Amazon Unbox is another tool added to the belt.