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."

Comments

Re:What are the terms of use for videos on iTMS

[mblase]

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.

Not to be an Apple apologist, but...

[Chucker23N]

...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.

Re:Why?

[jcr]

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