I had a couple guests over tonight and we decided to watch a movie. For some reason, we decided to browse the XBL and PSN Video Marketplaces for a film. On XBL, we came across The Shawshank Redemption. Unfortunately, it was only SD - so we decided to see if the film was available on PSN. To our surprise, it was - in HD too! So we began the download.

Now, I've never downloaded anything from PSN other than a few demos and an Add-On pack for LittleBIGPlanet, but I do know the downloads and installations take a long time for System and Game updates compared to the 360. I was not prepared for how long this would take. I have a 20MB/s download and I watched the movie download at less than 1mb/s.

Nonetheless, I figured once the "XXX Minutes Remaining" went lower than the duration of the movie (142 minutes), it would be safe to watch while it downloaded. We went about 15 minutes in before it began buffering every 30-50 seconds. We let it sit for about 15 minutes while we grabbed a drink and still...buffering. I could not believe it.

I've downloaded many films off of XBL and they take about 3 minutes tops before I can watch while I download. This was something else. After 45 minutes of fiddling around, I gave up and drove to my Barnes and Noble and picked up the Blu Ray for $30.00. I wasn't so much pissed that i had to purchase the movie, but more so that I wasted $4.50 on that damn service. I will never purchase or rent a movie from PSN again.

There is some good to be brought from the night. The Shawshank Redemption is my 100th title on Blu Ray. w00t

As of this writing, the download is at 87% and an hour has passed since we finished the film. Do the math.

In what seems to be MS playing some weird practical joke, my upstairs 360 has once again (fourth time, to be exact) been plagued with the Three Red Lights. It seems like my launch 360 got mad because he was getting less attention and wanted to remind me how tried and true he is. Looking forward for the fifth box. He should fit right in!

Oh well, seems like I'll be trekking the grand staircase more often to play some Halo.