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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.