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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."
Another reason to buy physical CDs/DVDs rather than downloads.
Apple doesn't do the upsampling, their content providers do. Blame Apple for not putting more pressure on them (although Apple are still in the 'beggars cant be choosers' stage here, so they probably cant put any pressure on at all), blame the providers for crappy quality.
Upsampling will not put more information in the picture. It just makes it look better. Possibly Apple is using the same way to upsample the video as you'd do yourself using Quicktime. However, when they have to recompress the video to distribute the upsampled video, there will be another round of quality loss. This is probably what makes the video from Apple look worse than just upsampling yourself.
To me, this is far more egregious than Sony's rootkit fiasco.
I've personally written software that had undesigned implications.
but...
I've never taken money, a second time, from anyone, knowing that I had already sold them that very same thing.
The difference is incompetance vs. intentional malice driven by greed.
I'll always choose to associate with a fool rather than someone I am certain is out to get me.
It's one thing to be a fanboi, the it's far lamer to be a trendwhore, and you, my friend, have bought into the current anti-apple trend hook, line and sinker.
iTunes is the best music management software given away with any >1% market share digital audio software. Whine all you want, but that's a fact, even despite Apple's tendancy to release new versions with a few too many bugs.
If she's got no friends and no car and lives in the sticks, then that woman is fucked. How did she get an iPod in this situation anyway? I've had friends using iPods with Windows 98 computers without a problem. A Google search will provide you with countless Linux solutions. And street vendor - are you having a fucking brain aneurism?
This is pretty much one of the lowest, lamest, trendwhoriest posts I've ever seen on Slashdot, and that's saying a lot. I hope your dick grew because you followed the trend to diss Apple's products and suckle up to Microsoft's Zune because it isn't an iPod even though it's a rebadge of a shitty Toshiba MP3 player. However what more could you expect from a lowly repair tech, then again it isn't as if you understand real world economics. Get a real fucking job, learn that it makes sense to have an iPod repair division when >75% of the market is iPods, and if a company is making 8 MILLION iPods a quarter, they can have leading-edge failure rates and you'd still get thousands of devices with issues. Also portable devices tend to have user-failure issues such as being dropped, etc, hence they'll be brought in for repair more often than other devices.
...as far as I know, encoding is handled not by Apple, but by the providers.
That is correct. This has been confirmed to me personally on several occasions by iTMS staff.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Even if content providers are responsible for encoding the files (which I doubt) Apple should still be professional and ensure they meet a certain standard. It just makes them look bad.
But why look at where responsibility lies when you can be trendy and bash Apple? After all, bashing big media is soooo 90's
The real litigious bastards...
I don't understand why they didn't forsee that one day i-pod screens would be larger, so they should keep everything in its native size
Because they [Apple] don't hold any of the native videos. They only distribute what the studio gives them to distribute. This minimizes any legal messiness if and when a studio claims that Apple messed with their content.
Each studio has a different policy, process and procedure - and *surprise!* - some studios may not be that adept at technology, and think that up-scaling a compressed video is a good strategy.
Best Buy is one of the largest retailers in the world, yet one out of every five or ten DVD's I purchase from them is defective. I gurarantee you they do not inspect stock from the distributors and subdistributors. In this case, I inspect the discs at the purchasing counter. I have held up other customers in the process... one of them may be you.
... or this is simply something they accepted and are willing to deal with it as long as customers are. The solution is to complain to Apple in a constructive way so they have an idea of what customers really want.
The Gap is one of the largest clothing retailers in the world, and one out of every three shirts I have purchased from them ends up discoloring badly in the wash in just a few months. Even though the clothing is their own brand, I guarantee you they do not inspect every shirt for quality. I no longer buy shirts from the Gap... Incidentally, I haven't had a problem with the Faconnable or Ralph Lauren polo shirts I paid $40-$70 for... you get what you pay for.
Apple is one of the largest retailers of online music downloads with global load-balanced hosting operations worldwide, and every 50 to 75 downloads I come across a music track that is encoded from a defective source. I guarantee you Apple does not inspect the contents of every item published to its library. Incidentally I've had even fewer problems with purchased physical CD's, or better yet, DVD-Audio, but I find there's a level of quality I'll accept to take advantage of certain conveniences over going out to the store and paying $20-$25 for a DVD-Audio disc.
Now, mind you I'm not defending Apple but I'm saying they're not unique at all in this regard. Obviously if there's a considerably high frequency of upsampled videos, then they've either got a problem they weren't aware of
If the majority doesn't care then the majority doesn't care... and Apple will offer products as they see fit. I don't recall anywhere in Apple documentation that they ever stated that products in the 640x480 library were remastered from the source. So, all the energy expended whining here on slashdot about it should be spent sending complaints to Apple so that they get the picture and do what needs to be done to retain their bottom line. If a large enough percentage of consumers call them on this, they will change their practice and require all 640x480 content to be remastered... but don't expect them to be inspecting the contents of every file submitted to them, as the process to verify whether or not the content is upsampled cannot be derived from looking at the metadata... Each file would have to be inspected manually, at length. The end result is that you'd have to wait a hell of a lot longer for new releases and you'd be paying much more for them to make up the difference in labor expenditures. Then again, if you're willing to pay $10 a single and wait until three weeks after its initial release to obtain it, who am I to question?
At least I can burn stuff I torrented to a DVD for playback, should that be the thing I want to do.
Why restrict your paying customers to less use than non-paying copyright infringers? Chewbacca is a Wookie! It does not make SENSE!
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Upsampling will not put more information in the picture. It just makes it look better.
Sure it puts information in the picture. Anything that isn't just doubling pixels has to, by definition, put some kind of information in the picture. The question is whether that information is "close to" what the REAL information would have been if the video had originally been shot at a higher resolution.
I've played with neural networks that "upsample" an image to double its original resolution, and the results (for a network properly trained on the appropriate types of images) are pretty stunning. It's not a general purpose thing by any means, but it does show how interpolating upsamplers can actually insert information into the image. Does that information come from anywhere "real?" I assert that it does, because images are not entirely random (or even close to it) and extra information can be inferred from relationships in the data (this is why lossy compression works).
Of course, what you really care about isn't the information content, but the subjective quality of the upsampled image. There's no real relationship between "extra bits" and perceived image quality. This is why general case upsampling is a very arcane subject.