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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.
...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.