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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."
Who cares, just don't contribute to their rippoff if you're a selfrespecting consumer who doesn't want to pay more for less quality, as is the case in this issue & with their crippled mp3 platform...
just wipe that Apple crap off the iPod and stick Linux on instead... then you're back in control of what you can and can't do with it.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
that is totally getting screwed with these new "higher resolution" videos. My powerbook is only 18 months old and it chokes when watching The Daily Show now. Come on Apple, not all of us own dual core intel macs, I paid you a lot of money and I feel really burned about the fact that you don't seem to care about your older products. I am not giving another penny to Apple until they fix this, as they seem not to want my business.
Not to mention Apple's policy of "we will give it to you when we give it to you" when it comes to releasing episodes of the daily show. Um, excuse me, I can watch a lot of the clips for free on Comedy Central's website for free before it is released via iTunes. Why do people who paid get treated worse than the people who get stuff for free(legally even!)?
Screw Apple, my next machine is going to be a Linux box.
Monstar L
Apparently you can do the following in iTunes:
1) Remove 320x240 video from library.
2) Check for purchases.
3) Download 640x480 video for free.
So you aren't forced to re-purchase it. iTunes Store is just allowing you to buy a second copy, like buying two copied of the same album - something people used to do a lot, one for the home, one for the car.
On the other hand, it is wrong of Apple to be selling videos at a high resolution that are lower quality than the original low resolution videos. This situation is only applicable to some videos however - I'd hazard that one batch of videos was converted incorrectly, and Apple will have to re-encode the videos now they're aware that some of the videos are poor quality. If Apple don't re-encode the videos, then they deserve the hate they're getting if only because they're purposely selling a poor quality product. They should also allow people to re-download the re-encoded video if they purchased the poorly encoded video.