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Apple iTunes Upsampling Higher Resolution Videos?
An anonymous reader writes "Engadget has a revealing look at Apple upsampling some of their new 640x480 videos from lower quality 320x240 videos. In fact, their upsampling appears to produce lower quality videos than quickly upsampling yourself with Quicktime. The worst part may be that Apple is charging people to download these new higher resolution videos even if they've already purchased the original, so people are essentially paying for nothing."
You're not allowed to burn downloaded videos to a video DVD, but you can back them up as a file to a DVD and play it again on iTunes.
This is a restriction imposed on Apple by the video owners, and was pretty much the only way they could get video on the iTunes Store at all. Hopefully they're still negotiating to have that particular block removed.
...as far as I know, encoding is handled not by Apple, but by the providers. Which, as a matter of fact, explains the discrepancy in the Engadget post: some videos look good at higher-res, whereas others appear to have been upsampled.
Most likely, not Apple is to blame, but the content providers, some of whom were apparently too lazy or stupid or stingy to provide truly higher-res versions.
Actually, in this case, I believe they are doing the upsampling.
Nope. Everything you can download from the iTMS today was submitted by the labels.
At the same time, a good friend of mine just sent a note stating his lable just got word from Apple that at least the audio components of the iTS (I guess its no longer the iTMS) are going to need uploaded in Apple Lossless Format. Does this mean Apple is looking forward to holding the uncompressed files and transmitting compressed or are they going to do the lossless files to the customer?
Neither. It means that Apple's getting too many complaints about the labels botching the conversion, so they want to do the compression in-house for quality control.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Close, its Apple Compressor that does the conversion of formats.
It can also use Qmaster to use multiple machines in Batch.
Kinda like the Acrobat Distiller of movies, and its part of Final Cut Studio.
No, you don't just "skip even numbered pixels". This results in major quality loss.
You want to take an average of every four pixels and use that to generate the new pixel. This results in a much higher quality image because you're using all the information in the original image to generate the final result, instead of only a quarter of it.
-Z
CDs have a dynamic range of a little over 20 KHz, not 44. They have a sample rate of 44.1 KHz, but you can't physically have a frequency response that is more than half the sample rate.
I'd also be interested to see some kind of documentation that reinforces your assertion that some early CDs were mastered from vinyl LPs. *Every* CD I own (and quite a few date back to the early days of CD) was mastered from the original studio tapes or first-gen copies of them, or from digitally remastered versions of those. Probably the most unique is the my copy of the soundtrack from "Star Trek II", where the original master was laid down on a very early digital recorder, and as a result it sounds like nasty, unwiped ass.
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