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

Why?

[Watson Ladd]

This makes no sense. Apple could use quicktime on all of the videos with ease, or resample. But instead they make the quality worse then if they had used Quicktime. I don't see how Apple wouldn't have used Quicktime in the first place considering they made it. Computer time really isn't an issue for Apple.

Re:Why?

[aplusjimages]

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 (the largest SD resolution possible). I work at a mobile content company and we make video ringtones, but we have copies of all are videos at the highest resolution, because we know that one day cell phones and mobile devices will be able to handle the higher resolutions. It prevents us from having to re-edit all those videos. When the time comes, I just run a simple batch and all are videos are ready.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Apple doesn't do the upsampling, their content providers do."

Actually, in this case, I believe they are doing the upsampling. Generally, the larger labels really don't care about reencoding what they've already put up there -- they only care about getting the new stuff up there.

I'm not sure why everyone thought that just because there is a new format, everything was going to be magically resubmitted to Apple.

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? He didn't know because the note said nothing about it.

Personally, I've never worried about the quality of the videos and all that. The videos are almost always better than I get from my local cable station...whatever that may be. After Battlestar went iTMS last year, I stopped doing the torrent thing and bought them from Apple (I also bought them on DVD, so I was never worried about the torrent stuff...I buy when I have a legal alternative). The iTMS vids were lesser quality than the torrents, *BUT* you never really noticed unless you were either completely anal or had paused a shot. Either way, the content of the show was there and it wasn't like Apple was providing an abridged version of the content. Same with music...as a former professional musician (and by that, I don't mean I've played a few bars) I've never really worried about CD vs. MP3 and I know very few pros that do. I use to get all sorts of promos and prereleases and everything else on CD...now they all send URLs to pick up the MP3s and they are happy with what it is. The last time I got a CD was at a release party and even then it was hinted that since I wasn't a journalist, there were only limited copies available.

This just goes back to content over 'quality'. Bad pop music with a limited lifespan? Yeah, it better be 100% lossless and the video at HD quality -- I'm going to get sick of it with each passing listen, so it needs to be perfect each time or I'll discard it that much faster. True classics? Well, I just transfered some shitty reel to reel studio outtake from an old blues guitarist that had molded up in someones basement to digital...there are dropouts and songs that just end and a general dampness about the sound that distorts it and makes it sound like its playing through wet cardboard...and its PERFECT. I couldn't imagine listening to this in any other format.

I guess this is the difference between consumers and creators. Consumers can't add anything to what they buy...creators will fill in the blanks in their head and be satisfied without whinging endlessly about getting ripped off.

I've ranted too long on this subject...

Re:Why?

[Golias]

Same with music...as a former professional musician (and by that, I don't mean I've played a few bars) I've never really worried about CD vs. MP3 and I know very few pros that do.

Oddly enough, professional musicians tend to be much, much more tolerant of bad audio fidelity than serious music lovers who don't play or only play as non-professionals. As long as there are no obvious distractions (such as surface noise from a record or tape hiss), they tend to "listen around" missing data better than most people.

The best theory for this I've ever heard is the "dirty window" analogy. If you look out a dirty window from a living room you've never been in, you will notice it's dirty right away. If you look out a dirty window from your own living room, which you have sat in every day for decades, you are less likely to notice the dirt because your mind knows what to expect to see. You know what that tree looks like, and where the row of hedges meets the curb, and the color of all the stones in the rock bed at the edge of your yard. When you look out your window, your brain "fills in" the missing information for you, and you don't notice the obstruction of the dirt.

A professional musician, one who spends several hours a day honing their craft and rehearses daily with an ensemble that if you play a sub-par recording on a sub-par sound system, they will only hear the music, not the digital compression artifacts or the cross-over "bulge" of the speakers or the "edginess" of bad D/A algorithms. They can probably tell the difference between a top-line system and total junk in a direct A/B comparison, but won't really notice the subtle differences between different quality speakers, nor will they have any idea what you are talking about when you complain about a 128-bit AAC file mangling a track.

It's not that their ears are not as good. Their ears are (often) excellent; they make their living with their ears as much as anything else. It's simply a matter of psycho-accustics.

Of course, then there are the professional musicians who simply have bad ears. Many rehearsal spaces used over the last 50 years by universities and professional concert halls over the past few decades utterly failed to meet OSHA safety requirements for db levels. My own music prof was forced to retire early due to severe hearing loss and tinnitus. A lot of musicians avoid going in for regular hearing tests, because they simply don't even want to know what the news will be.

What are the terms of use for videos on iTMS

[DrXym]

Apple made a big song and dance of the fact that you can transfer songs, and burn them to CD. Can you burn downloaded movies to DVD or are you restricted to play them on one or two devices?

Re:What's the point of paying twice?

[glesga_kiss]

I would say it is similar to paying for a CD of a record you already had on vinyl.

I disagree. CDs offer some advantages over vinyl, such as track skipping and fewer quality issues such as rumble and warpage. This would be more similar to someone borrowing your vinyl record and converting it to a CD, then selling it back to you. Except that is also a bad analogy as in this example you are at least paying for their time. Upsampling a bunch of videos is a simple hands-off batch script.

Usually when you buy a CD of something you had on vinyl, the CD is taken from the original master. This is the biggest flaw in your analogy; the CD does not derive from the existing product. These "high-quality" videos are simply relabled low-quality ones. In any other consumer product that would be illegal due to false advertising; certainally that is the case under UK law.

It's always interesting seeing an Apple story first thing on a Saturday morning. The Apple astroturfers that post here aren't working yet, so the discussion is quite candid. Compare to how it looks in four or five hours. If anyone is really bored, you could do a little study on post time vs post point-of-view. I think slashdot is crying out for this kind of study; it's quite possibly the most astroturfed site on the net.

Re:Trendwhores

[DanielNS84]

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.

So by applying my real-world experience to this situation I'm a trend whore? If you say so...

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.

Assuming I want my music "managed" I'd use windows media player, winamp, or xmms...iTunes is EASILY the worst piece of music software I've ever used. That said, I put my music in mp3 format directly onto my mp3 player using whatever OS I want...and if you're curious, I have a $40 256mb MPIO with a non-color screen and a rechargeable battery that gets badass playtime on a single charge and can be dropped without fear of a hard drive dying.

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?

I was including windows 95 in there as well and it's damn near impossible for the average user to get it working in windows 98. As far as the street vendors go, my mother was offered an iPod on nearly every street corner on her recent trip to columbia so this situation isn't as far fetched as it might appear...and also, who's to say she has an internet connection? I used my mp3 player without one for quite some time when I was in a tougher financial situation than I currently am, I simply used wmp (preinstalled on all windows xp PC's) to rip the songs then I transferred them over.

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.

We had plenty of other mp3 player types which sold probably %50 of what iPods did and we got nowhere near the same return rate. We also had probably %25 of the iPods come back from Apple unrepaired or broken more than they were, it was the worst of our DTV (Direct To Vendor) repair centers. As for you insulting me about my job, well, that doesn't speak well for your confidence level, not to mention your upbringing.