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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.