All though The Godfather and The Godfather Part III were available as pre-order movies, The Godfather Part II was no where to be seen, until now. The Godfather Part II is now available for purchase in the iTunes Store. There is still no sign as to when these will be movies will be available for rent.

Alliance which is Canada’s biggest film distributor has announced the availability of its movies on the Canadian iTunes store. As we Canadians know, the iTunes store has been very slow to ramp up content for non-U.S. customer. I haven’t got a full inventory but if you list all movies in the U.S. store you get 138 pages of listings, in the Canadian store, about 82. Not bad, but a little more than half the catalog. The situation with the Canadian iTunes store TV catalog is sad and I’ll blog about that later. Country-by-country licensing is lame in the Internet age. The Alliance news is good, however, the more the merrier.

iTunes SD Rentals New Release and Removals for 9-24-08.

We got 19 New SD Releases in today. A few good titles like Dead Calm, but the one that stands out from the rest has to be the classic 80′s comedy, Airplane! Surely, a lot of laughs to be had with this one. And don’t call me Shirley!

If there’s a movie from today’s New Releases that you believe is worth watching, please leave a comment. We would love to know about it. Thanks!

Click on the link below to view the rest of today’s list.
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Anyone who has been following this site knows that we usually aren’t the ones starting rumors, were usually the ones jumping on them, but this particular little nugget I found myself, so I thought why not post about it.
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Update – As site visitor Rick-O pointed out in the comments, Slacker Uprising is now available in the iTunes Store and in HD on the Apple TV as a free download.

Michael Moore’s newest film, Slacker Uprising, is now available to watch for free online at http://slackeruprising.com. The movie also available on Lycos, downloadable via Hypernia, on DVD via Amazon,coming soon iTunes! iTunes and in HD on the Apple TV.

The following is a synopsis of the movie straight from the site.

“Slacker Uprising” takes place in the wake of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” during the run-up to the 2004 election, as I traveled for 42 days across America, visiting 62 cities in a failed attempt to remove George W. Bush from office. My goal was to help turn out a record number of young voters and others who had never voted before.

Wether you agree with Michael Moore’s politics or not, it’s nice to see someone bypassing the studio route and releasing a movie directly to the people.

If you’re like me, you have had to convert various video formats to get it to play on your Apple TV. The lack of codec support in the Apple TV is a bit of a sore point with users (this one included). Luckily there are some good programs out there that do all the heavy lifting. For the Mac, some of the most popular applications are Handbrake, VisualHub and Mac The Ripper. For a good summary, see this recent Macworld article.

I tend to use VisualHub the most and it really is a great application and is well worth the $23. It has presets for Apple TV, iPod and others. You can even convert FLV (Adobe Flash Video) files from YouTube if you are so inclined. The new version now supports Dolby Digital/AC3 5.1 surround sound encoding. I also use Mac The Ripper to backup and extract the movie from the DRM on DVD’s and then Handbrake to convert to an Apple TV friendly mode. The real skill in all of this is getting good quality video, 5.1 surround sound in a reasonable file size.

I’d like to hear what techniques people have used to get good results for Apple TV video conversion.